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A blog about pretty much anything I feel like writing about.Thu, 23 May 2019 17:18:50 +0000en-US
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323277096569Review – Garmin Edge 520 Plus Bike Computer/GPShttps://randombitsbytes.com/review-garmin-edge-520-plus-bike-computer-gps/
https://randombitsbytes.com/review-garmin-edge-520-plus-bike-computer-gps/#respondThu, 16 May 2019 17:55:43 +0000https://randombitsbytes.com/?p=8827Review – Garmin Edge 520 Plus I’ve always ridden, logged rides, and trained with a multi-sport watch (except when I was a kid and had one of those gaugey sort of things), and in the last few years I have also used the top display on my Garmin…

I love to train and try to improve, but I also want to also just have an enjoyable bit of fitness without worrying overly much about what I’m doing so I’ve resisted getting a dedicated bike computer, for that reason.

Many others by other manufacturers seemed like good candidates – GPS/bike computers by Wahoo, Bryton, Lezyne, and so on. All make some nice bike computers/GPS units, and some very nearly fit the bill. Though one of the common drawbacks was routing or re-routing – many of which required a cellphone to be connected all the time for that feature. I wanted maps right on the machine, not continually using battery power and needing to be connected to my phone. I just liked the idea of always having maps right on there no matter what, and sometimes when mountain biking it can be iffy on cell signals.

I would have liked WiFi upload too – which when finishing a ride would automatically upload to the home network when nearby. But this seems to be uncommon, only on something like the high-end Edge 1030. Bluetooth upload is fine as a second choice for me.

On a side note – why didn’t Garmin make Garmin Express for computers have the ability to use the computer’s Bluetooth (if available) to upload in addition to the tethered USB method? Anyway…

So I did a lot of research, a lot comparisons, read a lot of advice from others who bike a lot, and read lots of messages on forums from users who actually use – and sometimes have issues with – each model (check out one of my favorite bike forums – Twospoke.com).I had a number of bike computers in mind, but really the deciding factor for me turned out to not be price (okay, yes; of course), or manufacturer, or even features (many were fairly comparable in that aspect), etc – but the hands-down uniquely great fact that Garmin Edge’s have the ability to be customized with Garmin Connect IQ. Connect IQ allows you to bring smart-like apps, widgets, and data fields to the bike computer – for expanded features, customization, and more abilities than the base unit may have. Garmin devices are amazingly customizable in the first place, a huge plus of course, but Connect IQ was the deciding factor for me. Just having bought a new Vivoactive 3 Music I quickly could see how powerful the Connect IQ ecosystem was.

So I really wanted to stick with Garmin for this reason specifically – in addition to features and familiarity with the brand. Eventually I came to decide on the Garmin Edge 520, but a week before I ordered that model I changed my mind and went with the Garmin Edge 520 Plus.

The differences between the two? Well, basically the Plus has routable maps where the regular 520 does not (obviously the Plus has more memory than the regular 520 and probably some slightly different, newer hardware). It also has a few small things like Trendline Popularity Routing, more about this later.

As with everything that I have bought from Garmin all included items are packed nicely into the box, wrapped in plastic baggies and padded well. What I seemed to have not included in this photo is the cardboard insert that holds the Edge securely in the box. Needless to say everything is secured and safe for shipping.

The box is easy to open as are the sealed plastic baggies. Included is the Edge (the face protected like most of Garmin’s stuff by a plastic fake map screen protector), a quick reference manual and other miscellaneous pamphlets, the charger cable, the out-front bike mount, and a variety of spacers for the mount and allen wrenches for tightening it, two stem mounts and lots of bands for the stem mount in many sizes, and a Garmin lanyard.

The Edge feels solid and beefy. No, not heavy (for you weight weenies out there) – it’s only 2.2 ounces (62.5 grams). It’s not heavy, but looking at it you can almost expect it to be lighter than it is; being packed with electronics, memory, heavy-duty battery, and various electronics and physical switches. The Wahoo Elemnt for example, is about 93 to 104 grams (depending on who you talk to).

The Edge 520 Plus came out in mid-2018, while it’s older originator the 520 had previously been released in mid-2015.

The size is about 1.9 by 2.9 inches, with the thickness about .8 of an inch (49.0 x 73.0 x 21.0 mm) with the display being 1.4 x 1.9 (35.0 x 47.0 mm) which gives you a 2.3 inch diagonal screen with a resolution of 200 x 265 pixels. It’s not going to be as high-resolution as your big HD-screened cellphone but it is more than capable of doing the job needed for displaying colored graphics and maps, gauges and stats. You’ll find some GPS bike computers like the Wahoo Elemnt have a higher resolution (the Elemnt is black and white though), but I doubt you’ll have any problems reading the maps just fine on the 520. It does have sound, it will make various buzzes and such. Not real loud and this was one of my concerns – but even with high winds, a skull-cap that covers my ears, and traffic I could still here the beeps.

The battery is a standard modern lithium-ion with Garmin claiming up to 15 hours of battery life (these stats are always under perfect conditions of course). I believe a more common estimate is around ten hours or so, depending on whether you have the backlight on, Bluetooth enabled, or not, etc.

It has an IPX7 rating which makes it water-resistant to one meter of depth, but more importantly makes it resistant to splashing and rain and snow, and if you drop it in a puddle it’s probably going to be just fine, likely. Leaving it underwater for a long period of time – not so much.

You’ll find the shape is fairly aerodynamic, it’s a rounded rectangle like most any bike GPS, with all four top sides sloping inward underneath with the forward end sloping inward at a deeper angle. It seems thick compared to, say, cellphones but width/length-wise it is very small. The screen occupies the majority of the top, ending a short distance from the edges on all sides.

For me the unit’s size is almost perfect – of course this is going to be a matter of personal preference but for me it is small enough to be unobtrusive when I am riding but easily readable when I need to see it – either on the out-front mounts or on the stem mount. For those with eyesight problems you might want to make sure you don’t use the whole ten fields per screen and bump it down to something that you can see better – you can go all the way down to one data field per screen; if you can’t see that then you probably shouldn’t be biking without assistance, I would guess. And there are some nice highly visible Connect IQ Data Fields out there.

On the upper left side is the power/brightness button with two up/down selection buttons below it, on the upper right is the menu/select option button and below it the return/back button, at the bottom edge is the lap button on the left and on the right the button to start/stop the timer. Buttons are good-sized and easily pressed.

Coming from a touchscreen world the buttons may take a little getting used to. And yes – I touched the screen a few times when I first got it; forgetting that does not work.

Touchscreens are great, but as you probably know sometimes when there is moisture on them they may not function correctly, don’t work at all, or even tend to flakily press the wrong thing on the screen in a random manner when you try to use them. Do I miss a touchscreen interface? Somewhat, but it doesn’t take much to get used to the buttons after a bit. It is a bit of a negative, unless of course it’s raining hard and you need to press a button.

On the bottom side is the quarter-turn Garmin mounting bracket, more about this in the next section.

Also on the bottom and near the bottom rear edge is a rubbery flapper that keeps the standard mini-USB plug waterproof. I’ve heard of people having problems with the little flapper coming off but Garmin should help you get a replacement if needed, and it is attached with a small screw under the edge of it, so it is user-replaceable. My advice is just to go easy on it and not tug it needlessly when you are opening it to charge. There is no SD card storage. I don’t have the exact amount of storage but the onboard storage has full maps of every road in whatever area you are buying the Edge from – all roads, both major and minor are included, everything.

Below this is the lanyard hole. The included lanyard is nice, and installing it is easy – and gives you a little security when you are carrying it, plus you can loop it around your stem or mount or something if you are concerned about safety (and maybe even security if you turn your back on your bike for a moment). More about this later.

Also onboard is a barometric altimeter so it is not relying on the GPS to calculate altitude changes, you can also calibrate this using the GPS though it is normally self-calibrated at the beginning of your ride after a good GPS lock. The GPS connects to US GPS’s as well as GLONASS and Galileo. There is an option for which GPS series that you want to connect to – the more it connects to the more accurate it is, but there is a slight increase in battery usage when more GPS sat locks are used. There is a thermometer which seems to work quite well, unlike the one on my Vivoactive 3 Music (can’t really expect it to be that correct – it’s on my wrist!) and a GPS compass.

The Myriad Abilities of the Edge 520 Plus

I’ll go a little into set-up below but in addition to hardware specs I wanted to go over some of the Edge 520 Plus’s software abilities and settings.

If you are used to call notifications on your smart watch and/or like to really keep up on what’s going on, the 520 has Bluetooth Smart Text & Call Notifications. These are selectable in a few different categories – text, social networking, and other; so you can pick which or if you receive notifications. You can further change some of these in Garmin Connect on your mobile device itself.

For fitness stats there is Recovery Adviser metrics, VO2 Max Estimation, FTP tracking and testing, Personal Records, Cycling Dynamics metrics, TP Levels, (you really need a power meter for some of these), Time in Zones, and personal records (some of which are downloaded from Garmin so it can be shown across multiple connected/supported Garmin devices). You can also download and use workouts/training calendar from Garmin Connect and use HIIT training. Between the 520 itself, the Garmin Connect App, the Garmin Connect website, and tons of Connect IQ apps; even the most fitness data-hungry users will find plenty to peruse and help in their training.

You can also race against a previously completed activity using the virtual partner – which you can turn off if not needed, or toggle on whenever you do.

The 520 can also control things like the Garmin Virb series (remotely taking photos, vidoes, etc) as well as Garmin Varia bike lights, and it integrates with the Garmin Varia bike radar system and will connect to an ANT+ FE-C Trainer – of course with regular bike sensors you can use it indoors with a regular ‘dumb’ trainer too.

For safety there is Integrated Live Tracking with a connected phone and even Group Tracking (though certain conditions have to be meant for this to work). And Incident Detection which sends an emergency contact notification to selected contacts. You are given thirty seconds to cancel the notification in case of false alarm.

Courses from multiple services can be sent to the Garmin app or imported, and in some cases sent directly to the Edge via an app. Courses from (of course) Garmin Connect, Strava, Komoot, TrailForks, and a number of others can be transferred to it in various ways – with methods ranging from easy to a bit more involved. More about all of this later.

The number of sensors that can be added is quite large – pretty much anything ANT+ including cadence, speed, power (including full settings), speed/cadence, and the Garmin Virb (added just like a sensor, same screen), and Varia lights and radar, Even weight scales. The nice thing about the sensors and connected devices is that you can rename them so you can have more than “65562 Connected” when a sensor connects. Nice feature there.

Unfortunately there is a sort of ‘sensor pool’ where you connect a sensor and it can be used by any biking activity type – for most people this won’t matter. But it is conceivable that if you have a road bike and mountain bike sitting in your garage and you accidentally jiggle the mountain bike while you are getting your road bike ready it MIGHT pick up one of the MTB’s sensors that were activated with movement, giving the first sensor of whatever type it is priority.

At this point you can go into the sensor connection screen in Settings and manually connect the proper sensor, making it take precedence over the wrong one. This of course would have to be in the same category as the incorrect one.

Another nice feature is something called Extended Display which displays some of the Edge’s metrics on compatible watches in addition to the onboard display.

You can also share some info with other users of Edge models. There are multiple types of things you can share, probably the most useful being courses. Another useful option is group track of others who are using the various models of the Edge.

And if you do keep your phone connected you can get voice queues for training and directions. Having a phone connected means you get things like updated weather (with the built-in weather app or Connect IQ ones).

Post ride it will show you recovery time and a detailed summary of your ride and some other options. Usually it will quickly upload your ride to Garmin if your phone is connected and nearby but you can manually sync it in Garmin Connect if needed. Some people have reported some issues with their’s getting unsynced to their phone/Garmin Connect and indeed I had this happen just one time so far while doing an indoor ride. Annoying but a simple re-sync was all that was needed, as well as powering down the device – and it only happened once (possibly because of something I did when changing settings for this review). You can also sync data via plugging the Edge into your computer with Garmin Express installed.

There is even the option of being able to do screenshots onboard.

Frankly, there are so many things you can do with the Edge 520 Plus, as well as options and ways to customize it; not to mention so many apps, widgets, and data fields on Connect IQ that you can add – I’m not going to even attempt to go over everything in detail. Connect IQ is one of the major pluses with the Edge series, I think. No other bike computer or bike GPS manufacturer seems to have anything like it.

For specific help on each function check out Garmin’s pretty good Edge 520 Plus help page -it’s a no-nonsense searchable resource that you are probably going to want to keep the URL handy for as you learn to use the Edge.

Mounting

You’ll find all sorts of Garmin and third-party mounts that this will fit on. Garmin’s mount system is secure, well-established, and common for Garmin bike comp/GPS’s. Just make sure you get a good full turn into the mount and that the pad is fitted in correctly, not usually a problem.

Installing the out-front mount is easy, there are multiple spacers included so it should fit anything from large handlebars to smaller diameter ones. The spacers have ridges that fit nicely into the accompanying slots in the clamp of the out-front mount, holding them in place securely. Included allen wrenches are used to tighten the clamp. The out-front mount also has a under-side attachment point for other devices also. This mount works great if you want the Edge in a fairly easy position to see, obviously out-front and in between your handlebars.

You can mount things like the Virb, other action cameras, and even a Garmin Battery Power Pack in the underside mounting position. BTW, you can charge it with a Garmin battery pack or any battery pack while the Edge is running.

For the stem mounts, they are pretty easy to install also. There are two included and lots of bands of a few different sizes. You use two bands with each end of the bands fitting into the tabs that are sticking out, with the bands wrapping around the bottom of your stem (more instructions from Garmin).

I like the stem mounts and the included out-front, but I did get a third-party out-front mount that also allows the Virb to be slung underneath, see the photo at the end of this section and that I liked.

The 520 Plus also comes with a lanyard, which fits through a mounting slot on the underside near the back edge.

Attaching the Edge is as simple as slotting it onto the mount at a right angle and twisting it straight, and it’s snapped into place. It is very secure, as secure as two plastic pieces fitted together can be I suppose. I’ve heard stories of it popping off if it is not mounted correctly, or in the advent of an extreme accident.

If you want more security, or just a handy way to carry it from your bike to the house there is the included lanyard. For extra security you could also hook this lanyard around your stem or the handlebars or maybe the out-front mount itself, or something like that.

60 pound test leader line used as lanyard (shown on 520 with silicone case installed).

For my use I’m attached a 60-pound test leader line made of stainless steel coated with nylon – some sets of these have nice little clasps attached – I use this as a safety lanyard instead of the included one. The clasps won’t fit through the lanyard’s hole on the Edge but if you get a longer line you can make a gentle u-shape in the line in the middle, and slide it through the lanyard hole starting at the u-shape (see pic). Then pass the rest of the two ends through the u and you have a nice and very strong cable that you can slip around whatever part of the bike you need it to, and it is much less obtrusive than the lanyard. I use this method with my Garmin Virb Elite Action Camera and the various mounts, including an aero-bar mount.

This could also provide a little extra security when it comes to turning your back on your bike for a few minutes. A thief could easily do a quick twist of the Edge and be gone, but fumbling with the clasp or trying to cut it with a knife is much harder and a bit more time-consuming (and this line is pretty hard to cut with a knife). And hopefully you wouldn’t be leaving your bike with the Edge on it unattended for long anyway. The lanyard would serve the same purpose if looped around something before the Edge is put on the mount.

The non-Garmin out-front mount also, just like the included one, allows me to sling the Virb underneath. See second pic below. This was a bit more trouble to attach to the handlebars but was worth it, as it is real metal and attaches right in the middle unlike the Garmin one. No issue with the Garmin one, I just kinda like things symmetrical

Set up is very similar to Garmin’s other fitness/exercise-related devices. Turn it on with the upper-left button (power) and start entering your weight, height, etc using a combination of the up and down buttons on the left and the menu/select button (upper-right button) to go to the next option. Of note here – you can only configure it for one person when it comes to body stats.

You can continue with the set up with adding sensors. You may have gotten the mountain biking bundle or something like that where the sensors may already be synced, or you may need to attach the sensors to your bike, or you may already have bike sensors – whatever way you are going to do it you can either add them here or wait and add them later.

Activity Profiles – the presets are Train, Indoor, and Race. There are various preset options already configured for you, for example the Indoor profile already has the internal GPS turned off. You can either change, create new, rename, or delete them here and modify any of the many options available for each. I left the Indoor as-is and renamed Train to Road and Race to MTB and went on to modify each according to my preferences. You can just skip by this part for now if you don’t want to mess with any changes because – of course – you can modify ANY of these settings later.

Syncing your phone is one of the important first settings to get accomplished. For this you’ll need to have your phone handy, Bluetooth turned on, Garmin Connect app installed and ready to add a device. I’m not going to go into the specifics here as it is similar to connecting other Garmin devices and not so dissimilar from syncing other devices.

A friend had a question about using it without a smartphone. You can use many of the features without a phone connected and you should be able to set it up and use it even without one. Of course you would need to plug it into a computer to upload rides, update the maps and firmware, etc.

The options on this device are many, and you may want to refer to the official Garmin Manual as well as the Garmin Forums for the Edge 520 Plus in addition to your own experimenting with how you want things configured.

Once you have things initially set up you can go in and tweak individual options – as I said above; there are a large varied number of them.

For example – for each “Activity Profile” i.e. ride type you can have up to five pages, with up to ten data fields in each page plus you can toggle on and off things like the Cycling Dynamics, Virtual Partner, Lap Summary, Elevation, Compass, Map pages right before a ride (or in a ride).

You can also create new Activity Profiles, rename and modify existing ones, change the color of each Activity Profile, toggle GPS/Glonass/Galileo satellite acquisition on and off, adjust map settings, alerts, Auto Features, etc.

You can have multiple Connect IQ data fields per screen, with a total of ten per “Activity Profile” or ride type. In real-world use you do have to remember that some Connect IQ data fields are doing a lot of calculations, so – depending on the Connect IQ field – you may find that some running in the background really affect the computer’s performance, especially when using map routing.

One slight disappointment for me, likely not for others; is there doesn’t seem to be any way to pair the Edge to more than one mobile device. With other Garmin devices I have been able to do this – sometimes with a bit of futzing around and sometimes not. But with the Edge 520 Plus there seems to be only the ability to pair it to one device running Garmin Connect and that’s it. Of course you can have multiple separate Garmin devices paired in Garmin Connect itself for each mobile device, but the Edge itself seems to be only pairable to just one mobile device running Garmin connect at a time. You can connect it to multiple computers running Garmin Express.

Probably not any issue for others, and just a minor annoyance to me – one that I frankly don’t even notice now.

On a bit of a side note here – Garmin’s Basecamp does work with the 520 Plus, though you can’t use it to install maps or anything like that (maps are automatically updated via Garmin Express/Garmin Connect). But you can use it to download, edit, and upload POI’s and tracks (courses).

In the way of ‘hacking’ (not really) you can also add a start up message in case you think your Edge might get lost or something. Plug it in, use your computer’s file manager to navigate to the Edge, click the GARMIN folder and edit the startup.txt file using Notepad or something similar. Type your message under the line it mentions in the comment line in the file, and you can also edit the <display = 0> for the time delay.

Using the Garmin Edge 520 Plus

The power up sequence for the 520 Plus is fairly quick (unless you have added a delay using the above text file change), once it boots you’ll see icons denoting your previously-added sensors along the top, as well as one for battery power, GPS, Bluetooth (connection to your phone), temperature, and time. Anything flashing means that sensor is not connected as yet, if you have a cadence or speed sensor for example – move your bike or pedals a bit to bring it out of power-down.

If you have multiple sensors for various bikes previously connected then some of these icons are going to keep flashing of course, if you are not using that particular sensor/bike.

A note here, BTW; you don’t need your phone to be connected to use the Garmin Edge 520 Plus. But you will not receive text messaging and messaging and notifications, Strava Live Segments (if you use that option and are a Summit member), weather updates, or voice queues, etc. and some other options, including some data that certain Connect IQ apps use.

Strava Segments in realtime are displayed; you can try for a KOM or race against friends or your own PR’s or your goals etc – just make sure you have Strava Summit, have connected Strava to Garmin in the Connect app, and starred some segments. There are a few options here – and one additional one you have if you access Strava from the website versus the Strava app.

If you are ready to go you will see the biking activity that you last rode displayed on the screen. If this is right then simply press the bottom-right button to be taken to your ride screen.

Alternately you can change to a different biking activity (I’ll get to that below) or you can access various other functions by pressing the down button, which at this point takes you to the Status page. This gives you a number of things including Settings, History, Stats, Training, Contacts, and Connect IQ. If you need to access a Connect IQ app this is where you want to do it.

Unfortunately you can ONLY access Connect IQ apps when you are not in a ride – you need to access the app before a ride or end your ride and access the Connect IQ app. This does NOT apply to Data Fields nor Widgets of course, both of which work fine and can run/be accessed in the middle of a ride.

You can also get back to this screen at pretty much any time, including in the middle of a ride, by pressing the bottom right button (depending on what screen you are in you may have to press it a few times to get to it).

If you do need to change to a different biking activity press the Menu/Select (upper right button) at which point you will be presented with a list of your biking activities. If you are using the default you will see Train, Indoor, and Race – if you customized this you will see whatever you created for activity types. The last one you used will be shown at the top.

You can use the up/down button on the left side to move up and down your list to select the one you want and press the Menu/Select button to select that activity.

Whether you went straight to your start screen or switched activities you will now be at your regular default number one ride page. If you didn’t change any default settings it will look something like what is in the photo to the left.

When you are ready to actually ride just press the bottom right button. This starts and pauses/stops your ride.

Nice feature – if you accidentally start riding without starting the Edge it will remind you with a flash and a beep.

If you are riding on an overcast day (or night) or using the Edge indoors on a trainer and while in a dark room you can turn on the backlight so that it stays on at whatever brightness you select, instead of going off after whatever time delay it is set at. Change this in the Settings under System and then Display. Changing it to Always On and adjusting the brightness can allow you to have the backlight on all the time but not use a lot of battery power, if you need this option. BTW, you can charge the Edge from a battery pack at the same time as when you are using it.

Pressing the bottom/right button again will pause your ride and give you the Save option – you can press the Menu/Select to save a ride or use the up/down buttons to navigate to and select using the Menu/Select button the following options:

Discard, does just like it says. It will give you a confirmation.

Back to Start (to navigate you back to your beginning point of course).

Status Page (giving you access to the built-in Weather app and the Widgets menu as well as the status of connected sensors, the GPS, and brightness).

Alerts Settings- time, distance, heart rate, cadence, etc; of of which you can edit while in a ride if you so choose.

The Data Fields for the current screen, again – you can edit these while riding.

Elevation Set. This sets the elevation manually.

Grade. This uses the built-in altimeter which is calibrated at the beginning of each ride using the GPS. The built-in grade data field is a bit laggy, but understandable in how it works. I have noticed a few other data fields from Garmin Connect IQ for grade are a bit less laggy, others more so.

Mark Location. You can edit the description of the location right on the screen here too. I’ll get to this a bit more later but if you are interested in being able to more easily navigate to places on-the-fly for navigation purposes I recommend marking various locations as reference points – city centers, villages, landmarks, friend’s houses, etc.

To get back to your ride activity page press the bottom right button.

Now you are back on page one; to scroll through your pages use the up/down buttons on the left side below the power button. Each page has the same options (or similar) as the above when pressing the Menu/Select button.

In addition to up to five pages for each activity (any of which can be toggled on and off) you can also have a navigation/map screen, compass, virtual partner, elevation profile, etc. Any of which can be toggled on and off. Some have their own additional page options. Virtual partner lets you set it’s speed, navigation allows zooming of the map (good if you want to find adjacent corners, turns, towns, etc).

While rides are transferred to Garmin Connect via your phone they are also saved on the Edge in the form of .FIT files, which are accessible with a computer or even using an OTG cable on your mobile device.

Navigation and more, scroll down for settings and other settings and options.

The Status Page, sensors, etc and built-in weather, and Widgets.

While on any page you can use the lower right button to get back to the screen you started when you started the Edge, and which gives you access to a number of things including Settings and more (down button to get to the Menu with Settings and Connect IQ, and other options, up button for Status screen).

Scrolling through pages while riding isn’t a big thing for most people, but if you are not the steadiest on your bike you might want to use the auto-scroll option. And of course you don’t want to be too distracted even if you are a steady rider. The buttons aren’t huge but they aren’t real small either and are easy to press, though pressing them with heavy gloves on can be problematic.

Pressing the bottom left button marks a lap manually and of course you can set up auto laps in the settings.

The display is easy to see in daytime, and with the light option turned on to a low brightness it is easy to see in darker conditions, indoors, or at night without using a lot of battery. Battery life is great on the Plus, though under real-world condition not as long as Garmin’s specs seem to say.

A minor annoyance after charging – after you unplug it from the USB it boots right up, so keep an eye on that so it’s not running after a charge. Though if you have the auto-poweroff turned on it will eventually just shut off on it’s own. Sometimes after an update it may need to go through finishing the update process after being unplugged.

Navigating Courses and Navigation in General

I wanted to interject here that you can always navigate back to your beginning point with the built-in ‘Back to Start’ option. Anyway…

Navigation to a location or around a course should be relatively familiar to anyone who has used a regular GPS/Google Maps and works quite well. Maps are already on the device itself (updated automatically and for free while plugged into the computer on Garmin Express or through the Garmin Connect app), and it does not grab them off your phone or cache them from the phone like other bike computers/GPS’s do. No connection to a phone is needed in fact (though you lose out on Live Tracking, Incident detection, notifications, updated weather, and such, etc).

When you order your Edge you get the map for your country according to where you are ordering it from, so you may want to check that if you are ordering from, say a US site and you are in another country; just to make sure. I have also seen that some people have loaded things like OpenStreetMaps.org maps onto it manually, done similar in manner to how it is done on other Garmin GPS devices.

Standard GPS Routing

Supposedly the Edge can save around a hundred courses and two hundred hours of logging but I have not yet tested this. BTW, the Edge uses a “smart recording” of data – recording data as needed when it changes. This saves space on the device though with a power meter connected it records the power data every second versus using smart logging.

If you pick “Back to Start” you can either have it take the quickest route or route you back using the route you came with.

Unfortunately some have said that routing can sometimes take a few minutes, but once it starts calculating you can start riding and let it calculate the rest of the route before it has finished the process. For me the route calculation only take a minute or much less.

The navigation page (whether you use the up/down buttons to go to it or when it pops up for a turn) show the name of street and the distance to the turn just like a regular GPS, and will show when you are off the route and auto-recalculate it (this is an option – as is most everything).

While you are navigating a course/route you can even skip a leg, or if you have missed a turn by accident and missed it; it will suggest a U-turn or you can keep going it will auto-recalculate and take you to the next section (this is also similar in how it navigates to a location, of course).

There are multiple ways to create and upload/send courses to the 520.

Probably the most used and well-known way is via Garmin Connect itself.

Created courses using the Garmin Connect app are somewhat simplistic and options are very limited, but you can still use it to create a quick course between a few points. On the app you will find it under TRAINING | COURSES. When you are finished you can use the three dot menu in the corner to send it to the Edge (or other courses) and access it on the Edge when you go to MENU | NAVIGATION | COURSES to find it (once the Edge and your phone has synced – you can also sync manually on the Garmin app but it may still take a few moments to show up). Just follow the prompts to start navigating.

The Edge itself also lets you create courses from activities by going to the above COURSE screen and selecting CREATE NEW.

The Garmin Connect website has a much more full-featured system, which you can access with a browser on ANY device. The courses can also be found under TRAINING | COURSES. You can even look up addresses in the website and use a shortcut to navigate to them (more about this later). The website has a pretty full-featured course creator and editor with the ability to set points, delete them, route by Garmin’s Heat Map Popularity Routing, by roads, or by free hand – the latter of which would perhaps work well for trails while MTB’ing. You can also do loops, out and backs, and reverse directions. There’s also elevation display and a pace calculator and the ability to show a road map or satellite map.

You then save it and send it right to the device or it will momentarily show up on the Garmin Connect app where you can send it to the Edge.

The course creator can be accessed on a desktop or laptop, but it will work on any tablet or even phone too. In the latter two cases you may need a little patience and a good ability to scroll and zoom on your device, depending on the size of the device. Some may find this cumbersome, or impossible to do using a mobile device and may want to use a computer or laptop/ Others may need a little practice if they want to do it on a mobile device.

The nice thing of note here is that you can create a course right in the middle of a ride if you wished to, or sitting in your car (not while driving of course), or standing by your bike before a ride, or wherever. On a phone it can be tricky, as I mentioned above, and involve some zooming out and in but it can be done. You can upload and start the course without ending your ride on the Edge and starting another. You can also use this as a ‘hack’ to navigate to a particular address or location, overcoming one of the limitations of the Edge 520 Plus – but more about this later.

On the Edge itself while navigating you can set zoom level on maps to either automatic or manual but as far as I know there’s no way to pan around the map if you are looking for nearby alternative turns, etc. Zooming out temporarily works fine, but it would have been nice to be able to re-position the map and move around it a bit. Ah, as I type this I see the new Beta firmware from Garmin will likely have panning, yah-hoo! Look for this feature in new firmware editions.

And there are many route options right on the Edge (Menu | Settings | Activity Profile | SELECT ONE | NAVIGATION | ROUTING) including the option to lock or not lock on a road, the method used to calculate routes, avoidances, and routing by popularity. Popularity rating gets it’s routing from Garmin’s Popularity Heatmap (in the Garmin Connect website go to Training and then Popularity Heatmap) and will route you through more populate biking routes than a direct route – in some cases they may be more interesting, less hilly, more bike-friendly, o r avoiding things like construction or rough pavement.

Create a Course and Import in Garmin Connect website

You can also create courses on any number of websites including Strava, Komoot, and others. Strava, Komoot, TrailForks, and some others have apps for the Edge in Connect IQ that interface directly to the websites for direct download of routes. Other sites will output .GPX or .TCX files that you can import into Garmin Courses. Look for the IMPORT link under the CREATE A COURSE button. Also, see below for using special Connect IQ apps like the excellent GRouteLoader and other methods.

You can also shortcut creating a course and not use the Garmin Connect website on your mobile device at all, and instead use the Connect app. Export or save the .GPX or .TCX from whatever website or app you create the course on your phone. Then open it – you can open it via the notification bar, a pop up notification when it is downloaded, a file manager, or whatever you use to navigate to the .GPX or .TCX file. It SHOULD pop up and ask what you want to Open the file with, in this case you select the Connect app and follow through with creating the course in the app. I can’t guarantee that this will work on all devices or exactly the same as I explained here, but it should be similar (unless you have associated .GPX and .TCX files with another app on your device). This is also a good way to quickly navigate to a location while in a ride, but I’ll get to that later.

You can create courses from your rides right in the Connect website by clicking on a ride and then clicking the gear icon, and selecting ‘Save as Course”. This does not work in the mobile app but you can do it with the website whether you are on a computer or mobile device.

There are other methods too.

One of the things of note here is that with Garmin Courses you can create, upload, and begin a course right in the middle of a ride without ending the ride and starting a new one. But if you use Strava or one of the other apps on the Edge you will may have to end the ride (save) and begin a new one.

For courses you get turn-by-turn notifications, the little map screen popping up (unless you’ve turned it off), and a beep to remind you. You also get voice notifications on your phone if it is connected and you didn’t turn that option off.

Courses via the Strava app on the Edge.

There’s not much that I can say about the turn-by-turn directions as they work fine for me, and are very similar to every other type of GPS. Some people have reported a few problems here and there, and of course your directions are only as good as the map the device is getting them from.

Garmin seems to update the maps fairly routinely. For my area there are roads that have not been roads for decades and still show on GPS’s (of all sorts) as well as paper maps. So sometimes a course or navigation takes me to a place that is not a road, but continuing on just causes the Edge to recalculate and I continue on just fine, picking up the course when possible – albeit with maybe a slightly longer course.

If you do need to end a ride and start a new one in order to follow a new course in the middle of a ride you can always use websites like .FIT file stitchers and GPSes editors to merge your rides after upload.

Navigating to a Previously Saved Location

You can navigate to a saved location just like any GPS, similar to how you would do it on your phone or on a dedicated GPS or the one in your car. The Edge is supposed to be able to save around a hundred different locations.

Of course you can only navigate to something you had previously saved (via the Edge, or uploaded with Basecamp), there’s no native way to just stick an address in and navigate to it, or to select a business or coffee shop, etc and go to it.

But never fear – there are ways around that and it CAN be done, we’ll go over that in a bit. Thanks to the magic of Garmin Connect IQ

To access your saved locations press Menu and then Navigation and then Saved Locations. You can find this on most of your ride pages.

From here you can select and navigate to a saved location, delete one, edit its name or manually set the altitude, etc.

While on a ride you can save any location and edit the name, delete it, etc.

Unfortunately Garmin does not give you the ability to add or edit locations via the Garmin app or even with the Garmin Connect website but I have found that Garmin Basecamp will do this. There may be others.

With Basecamp you plug your Edge into your computer and presently you’ll see existing locations show up over on the left pane. You can create any number of locations on a map, name them, give them a symbol, and then upload them to the Edge.

By the way, you can also create and download tracks with Basecamp for the Edge too.

A little tip here – I like to create a location for each important part of the nearby city, village, multi-use trail head, friend’s place, favorite hills, etc ahead of time for quick navigation so you have it handy right on the Edge if and when you need it.

So, what happens if you need to navigate to a specific point in the middle of a ride? Maybe you have a hankering for a coffee at Starbucks, or you need to meet someone somewhere, you’re bonking and need a protein shake from your favorite health food shop across town, or someone needs a hand fixing their chain while out on their ride? You can pull out your phone of course but then you either have to mount it on your handlebars or hold onto it or pull it out for turns and directions or try to memorize where you are going.

Well, as you may or may not know the Garmin Edge 520 Plus is not (natively) made to do this. If you want it directly on the device without using one of the methods I go over before you will need to move up to the 1030 or one of the other Edge models.

But the Garmin Edge 520 is a great bike computer, and if you want to be able to navigate to a specific point while on the fly, it can be done. See the next section.

Navigating to a New Not-Previously Saved Location

Ideally there should be a way right out of the box either on the Edge or through the Garmin Connect app to go to an address, a business, a multi-use path trail head, coffee shop, whatever or at least transfer locations from your phone to the Edge. There isn’t.

There isn’t a built-in way of doing it, but there are plenty of ways of doing it using Connect IQ apps and widgets – some of which work nearly as well as something natively would work, others taking a few extra steps, and some which are workarounds.

Some people may not ever need to use any method to go to a location that they have not previously saved so this may not be relevant to all.

And I welcome any better or alternative ways that others have found, post in the comments below or contact me.

So I’ll break this down into three general methods:

Using an app or widget – with widgets or apps you can send a location directly to the Edge for navigation. Like the excellent GRouteLoader widget or the Yelp app.

If you need to navigate to a specific address or location that is not a business or near a business that you know of, the basic way to do it is to use some sort of a course creator app on your phone, making as short of a ‘course’ as possible at the location you are going to so as to allow the Edge to navigate to that tiny course. Depending on your method you may be able to do this in the middle of a ride (like if you use the Garmin Connect website) or you may have to end your ride and set it up, then start a new ride.

1 – My favorite widget for fairly quickly and efficiently sending a location directly to the Edge in the middle of a ride or beginning of a ride is the Swiss Army Knife of navigating widgets for the Edge called GRouteLoader (there is also an app but you have to start it before a ride or end the ride to use it, unlike the widget).

Pressing the upper-right buttons takes you into the menu which gives you some menu options like “Courses” – which shows you a list of courses you had downloaded earlier, “Download by route number” – which gives you a ton of more menu options to connect to various sites and apps, gexporter/android – which lets you access and import from various sites and apps.

There are a lot of options here – many ways to access sites and apps to import courses and locations, from using other Connect IQ apps, mobile device apps, Plus codes (you can enter these directly, there are a number of apps and websites that will give you the Plus Code for a location – like this one), and much more.

I won’t go into all of them (see the help PDF for more), but the important thing here is that you can access the widget in the middle of a ride and directly import courses and locations into the Edge 520 Plus, thus overcoming one of the limitations of the Edge 520 Plus. Now this limitation may never bug you in the first place and you may never need to use this or care about it. But if you do need or want this ability this is the widget to get. You can also of course access the widget before your ride too.

The time taken to find a location and transfer it is fairly small once you get used to the process,and depending on which app or method you use.

I will quickly go over one option for directly loading a location into your Edge – the one I have used multiple times.

So on the Direct Download screen are many options, including my second favorite way to import locations – entering a Plus Code (which you can see is one of the menu options in the photo to the left).

But the example I am going to use here, and which I which the most often – is the ‘Sendpoints Location – by number’ menu item at the bottom. This allows you to use the website Sendpoints.us to search for a location by business name or other name, by address, or by entering a coordinate. You can use something like Google Maps to get a coordinate or or anything that outputs location and coordinates. The Sendpoints website works great on it’s own by entering an address or location – but for places without an address you can touch and hold your finger on the Google Maps screen and find the location to enter into the Sendpoints website. You can copy to your phone’s clipboard and paste it in, perhaps editing the entry.

On the Sendpoints page you usually only need to begin to type an address or business or location name and it will start filling it in and populating a list to choose from, at which point you can select it and it will show the location on the map, at which point you can then click the SEND button. This creates a temporary four digit code that you can enter into the Sendpoints Location menu item in the GrouteLoader widget. You use the up/down areas on the 520 and the upper-right button, as well as the lower-right if you make a mistake. Once done use the up/down buttons to scroll to the checkmark and press the upper-right menu button. It will then be entered into your Edge’s locations, at which point you can go to your regular navigation screen and select that location to navigate to, or have it available for later.

It works quickly and slickly and does the job and fills in a possibly important (for some people) missing feature of this device.

As I said above – the GRouteLoader also has many other options for transferring routes and locations.

The Sendpoints.us website is actually created by and run by the person who created the Connect IQ app SendPoints app – this one works great too, with the downside being that it is an app so you have to use it before a ride or end a ride to access the Connect IQ app screen on the Edge.

This allows you to use the corresponding website Sendpoints.us to enter addresses, businesses, coordinates, etc into the field and it will create a four digit code that you enter into the Edge app to create a new location on your Edge, which you can then select and navigate to.

IQMapReceiver (widget or app), My Places r.485 (widget or app), mapfield are other alternatives, and other apps or widgets that do the same.

Unfortunately I can not get IQMapReceiver to work even though others may have. If you get it to work please let me know.

Yelp works great too, and you want to probably install it ahead of time. Again, this is an app and not a widget like GRouteLoader is so you are going to have to end your current ride to use it, or use it before your ride.

Yelp app on the 520 Plus

Go to Menu (down arrow when you are on main screen), scroll down to Connect IQ apps and then go to Yelp, make sure your phone is connected, and find the business, restaurant, or other place of interest in the Edge Yelp app that is where you are going or is near your destination.

So if you are going directly to a location shown in Yelp you’re set, it will take you directly there. But you can also use this as a shortcut for navigating to a location if you know that location is near a business or other place listed in Yelp. If you’re not sure of a business or other place near your destination you can usually find something in Google Maps and then find that in the Yelp app. Unfortunately for rural addresses the nearest business may not be that close – you can always use GRouteLoader instead.

Once you have a business, POI, or other location that you are looking for or nearby you can just follow through the prompts in Yelp, which guides you through the normal activity ride type, etc for beginning your ride and uses the Edge’s regular location navigational features.

2) The idea here is to’ trick’ (not really) the Edge by navigating to a tiny course uploaded to it and corresponding to the location that you want to ride to, thus letting the Edge give you the option of navigating to the beginning of this small course and taking you as near as possible to your destination.

I originally wrote this section before finding the widget GRouteLoader but I think it is still valid – but the other methods listed above are much easier and better, I believe.

There are many apps as well as websites that allow you to create a course on your phone, some can connect directly to the Edge via an app or widget and some allow you to export a .GPX track that can be imported into Garmin Connect. Again, see the GRouteLoader widget.

You can use the Garmin Connect website (not the app – the course creation menu in the app isn’t very effective for this) – while this method can be fairly quick if you are used to doing it, it is sometimes not easiest and takes a bit of maneuvering to get to work, especially for those who aren’t used to zooming and such on their phones.

For this you may need to play around with rotating the phone to landscape mode and back to portrait, zooming in and out, and hiding the keyboard as needed, and possibly switching your phone’s browser to Desktop mode during the process. It can be awkward – especially when switching to Desktop mode, but once you get used to it it works quite well. If you’re not good with using your phone’s pinch zoom and things like that you may want to skip to another method.

In the Garmin Connect website go to Training and then Courses, select Create a Course, pick Road Cycling (or whatever), and type in an address and click the magnifying glass icon.

At this point you can select “Follow Roads” under Custom Drawing if you need to get to your destination quickly, otherwise leave the default Popularity Routing selected.

Now touch the destination that was shown when you did a search (or you can scroll around the map too) and you will see a pin dropped there, drop another as close by to it as you can and you are done. If you switch back and forth between landscape and portrait, zoom in/out, scroll around you can find where it says “Untitled” with a little pen symbol beside it – you can either change the name here or just leave it as is. Now you can click “Save New Course” and once that is done you will see a button that says “Send to Device”, select your Edge and it should be on it’s way. If you have your browser set to Desktop mode it may give you a message about installing Garmin Express, don’t worry about it. Or it may just load up the Garmin Express app.

Sync

Either way load the Garmin Connect app (perhaps going to Courses in the app to make sure your new course is there, you may need to refresh that screen to see it) and go down to your device (Menu | Garmin Devices) and click the Sync button. Or let it sync by itself if you’re taking a break or whatever.

Once it is sent to the Edge it will show up in Courses on the Edge and you can then select it, at which point the Edge asks if you want to navigate to the beginning of the course.

So…It is not the easiest to create a route on the Garmin Connect website on a mobile device beside the road but do-

able, and the big advantage is that you can do it without ending your ride and starting another.

Alternately you can use the Strava, Komoot, or another app Connect IQ app (usually in conjunction with a corresponding website) to load (or create) courses or import a GPX into Garmin Connect App on your phone. Or the above methods I went over earlier.

For importing a GPX on your phone export a .GPX from your favorite website, then it will either pop up to show the file has downloaded or maybe you will need to touch the file from the notification bar after the file has downloaded or something like that – whatever your particular device does – it will then ask you something along the lines of what you want to open it with, in this case pick Garmin and follow the prompts in the Garmin Connect app to create a route from it, follow the rest of the directions above to send it to your device.

Komoot has a built-in course editor which you may find works better than trying to create one on any website on your mobile phone. It works quite nicely.

A Few Additional Things, How I Have Mine Configured, Favorite Connect IQ Apps, Data Fields, and Widgets

A little trick here for some – you can shut the Edge down in the middle of a ride and not have it sitting on pause, auto-pause, and using battery power. Maybe you’re stopping for lunch, a coffee, to gab, or to talk to a friend, or whatever.

Just be careful not to discard or save the ride when the dialog comes up – just hold the power and shut it down when it asks if you want to.

Now don’t blame me if you accidentally discard your ride or something, but I have tried this multiple times and it works fine. Once you power the Edge back up it asks if you want to resume your ride and you continue on your merry way.

In addition to saving power and such – it can help if you find that Strava counts the time on pause as part of your ride and you don’t want that half-hour lunch as counting for your total ride time.

For page configuration I have the first/main page on each biking activity as the My Edge 2 Data Field. This is a nice over-all display of the most important and relevant things needed at quick glance, in a nice attractive gauge/digital sort of configuration.

In case you don’t know how to set something like this up – a large Data Field like this needs to take one whole page so you just need to install the Data Field in Garmin Connect or Express, and select ‘one’ as the number of data fields for that particular page, then select that Connect IQ Data Field.

For the next page I use an overall summary of averages with average cadence, speed, heart-rate, elevation, etc.

The next page is an elevation stats screen with elevation, elevation increase and decrease, grade, vertical ascent speed, and others using the built-in altitude/climb-related Data Fields with the addition of the Connect IQ Data Fields Elevx4 and Sensible VAM – which of course shows a calculated VAM from barometric altitude change.

The next screen is a full page using the Data Field Multi Page Race Notes which allows me to add any notes you wish. I usually have this turned off as I don’t usually need it but it is easy to switch back on as needed, and notes can be transferred from the phone.

The next page is usually toggled off and is the page where I may have various Data Fields in full-screen for a specific purpose, some of which I may change out as needed. For example; for training I might use the Visual Speed Alarm Data Field – which is similar in idea to the built-in Virtual Partner Page, just a different way of displaying it with a nice gauge.

I usually leave on the built-in Virtual Partner, Compass, altitude summary, and of course the map – whether I am navigating to something or not.

A suggestion for those without a power meter; give HR to Power a try. Your results may vary and this is just a formula-based calculation with a few settings that you can tweak. It even saves this data in the .FIT file that is transferred to Garmin (as well as saved on the Edge) and shows up in Garmin Connect.

For indoor training and really hot weather I also use the Data Field Eat! Drink! Reminder!, though you could easily set up a time-based alert instead. But this Data Field makes a less-intrusive series of beeps to let you know that you need to hydrate, or whatever.

In addition to using the built-in weather (which can be accessed on the stats screen) I use the widget Accuweather Minutecast. I have to say – I am not normally a big fan of AccuWeather but this seems to have a very good accuracy and shows you the chance of precipitation in the coming few hours as well as an hour-by-hour summary, similar to the built-in weather. Of course your phone must be connected for this to get the weather. Between AccuWeather and the built-in weather you can get a pretty accurate idea of what the weather is doing – rain, wind, etc.

For apps I mostly use things to help with navigation; I know I have mentioned this multiple times before – you can only use apps when you are not actively logging a ride. In other words you have to end your ride to use these apps, and then start it again (usually from within the app).

Yelp works great and probably is a must-have, taking you through the search process and letting you start the ride to navigate to your destination.

Trailforks lets you navigate mountain bike trails, though for my area I found only a few trails.

Strava Routes lets you download from Strava your saved routes/courses and as I mentioned above you can use the Strava website on your phone to create a small route and trick the Edge into navigating to it, but it takes some elbow grease to create it on your small phone screen in the website. With Summit you can get the beta route planner app, and do this more easily.

Komoot is another app that connects to Komoot and can transfer courses, again you can use the above shortcut for getting to a location in addition to using this for courses/routes. The difference here is that the Komoot app is much easier to create a route on than trying to use a website.

In the realm of odd things that you might do with your Edge there are multiple apps for various things, like OutdoorSports+ (just what the name says), Weight Tracker, StairStepper+, and even Yoga+. I think Yoga is great, especially for cyclists and especially as we age – but it seems like an odd thing to use the Edge for, but if you don’t have an alternative for logging it it likely works just fine.

I also picked up a few accessories.

Firstly the excellent Akwox tempered glass screen protectors which are very easily applied and work like a charm. They are nice and thick (after all – there’s no touchscreen to obstruct) and works perfectly with the Tusita silicone case for the Edge. The case is easy to slide the Edge into and holds it securely, providing some great padding and a nice look, and all access to buttons, charging port. And it does not get in the way of the mounting disc; which I have heard that other cases do. The case also comes with some plastic screen covers (I passed these on to an acquaintance) and a lanyard.

Later I bought a different out-front mount than the included Garmin one, that was attached in the middle of the handlebars instead of the mounting part being offset. It is aluminum alloy and allows the Virb to be underneath.

Conclusion

Pros –

Great biking computer/GPS

Tons of features

Multitude of options and configurations

Lots and lots of Connect IQ apps, Data Fields, and Widgets

Small, relatively light and compact but solidly built

Great display, totally customizable

Smart features with phone connectability

Strava Segments integration (for Summit members)

Bluetooth auto-upload of activities

Connection to pretty much any sensor you might need on your bike or person

Personal stats, connection to Garmin Connect and subsequently Strava and all fitness ecosystems connected to this two

Course navigation, and navigation to saved locations

And much more…

Cons –

No native way to look up addresses and business unless you use apps, widgets like Yelp app, GRouteLoader, or one of the roundabout ways I explained above.

No touchscreen (may not be a con for some people).

No wifi.

As of the first publish date of this post (Spring 2019) the new Garmin Edge 530 is in the process of being released. The 530 has a number of updated features while still being fairly similar to the 520 series. So if you like my review of the 520 Plus (and the regular 520) keep an eye out for discounted prices as the 530 starts being released.

I would highly recommend the Garmin Edge 520 Plus despite a few drawbacks (which usually can be overcome). It may seem pricey to some but considering the huge numbers of things that can be done with the Edge 520 Plus and the options it has; it is well worth it. For training, for enjoyment of biking, for navigation around courses (and with a little help – navigation in general), and data/stat junkies you can’t go wrong.

As you can see with the length of this review, there are options and customizations and features aplenty for anyone. Get one, you won’t regret it!

]]>https://randombitsbytes.com/review-garmin-edge-520-plus-bike-computer-gps/feed/08827Review – Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music & Garmin Vivoactive 3https://randombitsbytes.com/review-garmin-vivoactive-3-music-vivoactive-3/
https://randombitsbytes.com/review-garmin-vivoactive-3-music-vivoactive-3/#commentsSat, 05 Jan 2019 18:10:19 +0000https://randombitsbytes.com/?p=8646 This review will thoroughly cover the Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music and the Garmin Vivoactive 3 fitness smartwatches. For a number of years I have used my venerable Garmin Forerunner 620 for tracking my biking, running, hiking, walking and a number of other exercise- and fitness-related activities. It was a great…

For a number of years I have used my venerable Garmin Forerunner 620 for tracking my biking, running, hiking, walking and a number of other exercise- and fitness-related activities. It was a great watch but somewhat limited in some ways. For example – you can only select biking, running, or race categories for exercises (though it was easily changed on Garmin Connect after upload). Despite a few things like that I’d probably still be using the watch if it weren’t for the fact that the battery capacity had started to decrease. For a three-hour ride out on the road it still would be at fifty percent battery power. But with anything like hiking or mountain biking in the woods where the GPS was using more battery power to get and maintain a good signal lock the battery power would drop off more steeply. A three-hour mountain bike ride on a railtrail would pretty much exhaust the battery. And like so many modern devices there is no way to replace the battery without sending it back to the factory.

So I started looking around for a new Garmin (or other manufacturer’s sports watch). My wife had also needed to replace her 620 some time before and, after a lot of research, she picked up the Vivoactive 3 Music.

The newer Fenix versions seemed to have every single thing that I wanted – except they are quite high-priced and quite large on the wrist, this being important especially since I would likely be using my new watch as an all-day activity tracker also, replacing my Fitbit Charge 2. Did I want to wear something that large on my wrist, even if I did want to pay that much for it? Would it be too big on my wrist for comfortable sleeping? Used ones and remanufactured ones were possibly an option with the Fenix, bringing the price down significantly but also increasing the risk of faulty watches or shorter lifespans, or other issues.

The Forerunner 735xt seemed a good option, but was a little older (by a bit) and was a bit more money than the Vivoactive 3 series. It also had somewhat similar charging system as the 620; the charging ports of which that caused both my wife and I trouble over time. The 735xt was very close in features to what I wanted.

The Vivoactive 3 on the other hand was only a year old, was becoming fairly popular it seemed, and had the majority of the features I wanted.

After lots of considering I came to the conclusion that those extra features I would be missing on the Fenix series and 735xt and 935 weren’t so important that I really needed them, and I could save myself a few bucks and go with a Vivoactive 3. The 3 Music was a bit more and I didn’t think I needed its music abilities and the few extra features.

When I got the Vivoactive I found it excellent for the most part, though I did have the occasional complaint – as I would probably have with even the expensive Fenix – nothing’s perfect. But a few things specifically did bug me – things that would be covered in the 3 Music edition.

Firstly, the storage capacity for apps, widgets, watch faces, and data fields was half that of the slightly newer Vivoactive 3 Music version.

So this limitation was a bit annoying, especially when testing a lot of apps and data fields. I figured eventually it wouldn’t be a big deal as I would settle on a set number of apps and data fields that I would use regularly. But it still would be nice to have the extra storage space on the watch.

The other thing I missed was the ability to upload via WiFi which the 620 had. I don’t normally have Bluetooth turned on my phone to save battery, and because I don’t have too much that connects via Bluetooth and needs to be ALWAYS connected. I really missed the WiFi ability.

When an opportunity came along to get a Vivoactive 3 Music edition I decided to give it a try.

A Few Differences between the Vivoactive 3 and Vivoactive 3 Music

Cosmetically the 3 Music has a much more rounded, protruding Gorilla Glass above the bezel than the basic 3. I worry a bit about this sticking out as I do a lot of outdoorsy sometimes DIY sort of things. The nice thing is that I found a few cases/covers that are made for the Vivoactive 3 series bezel, plus there is both plastic as well as Gorilla Glass for the face – both of which offer much more protection. More about this near the end of this post.

The 3 Music is also missing the side slide thingie – you can rub your thumb along the left side on the basic 3 to scroll the screen but the 3 Music does not have this. Maybe good for underwater when you can’t use the touchscreen? Otherwise no loss there for me. Also in the Music version you lose the ability to flip the watch 180° if you like the button on the other side.

Otherwise they look the same except the charging port is in a different place on the 3 versus the 3 Music. Both are underneath, and their different locations don’t seem to have any bearing on use or charging.

The other differences are, as I mentioned – the 3 Music has more storage capacity and also WiFi, as well as the ability to play Music through Bluetooth of course. The Music version is only slightly thicker.

So right away I found that the ability to load more apps, widgets, data fields, and watch faces was a huge plus. Even if I never put one song on the watch the extra capacity was important to me personally. And having the ability to upload via WiFi was a big plus too. WiFi can be either manually or automatically.

Unboxing (What’s in the Box) and Overview of Set Up

Vivoactive 3 and Vivoactive 3 Music boxes

The box looks nice, and everything is packed well, as you would expect from Garmin. A piece of folded cardboard protects and separates the watch (in the middle) from the charger cord and paperwork on either side (both in little baggies). The watch also has a protective plastic cover over the top and the band and watch is clasped around a foam oval in the middle. The smart charger cable has a USB on one end and the matching charger port for the watch on the other (proprietary to Garmin but used on a number of other Garmin watches), there is no wall plug or anything (but don’t we all have enough of those lying around anyway, left over from lots of other devices). You can of course charge it via a wall plug or computer.

The only difference between the packaging of the Vivoactive 3 versus the Vivoactive 3 Music is the manual. The one for the 3 is very small and the one for the 3 Music is quite heavy, though the bulk is taken up by reprints in various languages.

Unboxing of Vivoactive 3

Looking through the manual I suppose it is fine but for the most part everything was pretty straight-forward setting up – charge it fully first though – and any advanced questions I had were answered via the Garmin online manual (Vivoactive 3 Manual and Vivoactive 3 Music Manual) or Garmin forums.

Upon starting the watch you will see the Garmin logo and you can set your watch up like most Garmin watches and other devices, following the prompts, installing the app (Garmin Connect app for Android, Garmin Connect app for IOS) and pairing it, and once connected to the app you can tweak many settings. You probably want to connect it to your computer occasionally via Garmin’s Express program. You may find that you can do certain things with the watch connected to your phone that you can’t with Express and vice versa.

Some Specs and Hardware

Both the 3 and 3 Music have Corning® Gorilla® Glass 3, which is a specially formulated glass that is atomically more durable as well as chemically strengthened. It is not the newest version of Gorilla® Glass® – but it is a strong, well-established material used in many watches and phones of all kinds. It’s not indestructible but if you’re been using mobile devices for a long time you’ll know that each version from Corning is better than the last. The color display itself is transflective memory-in-pixel (MIP) and about 1.2 inches (30+ mm) in diameter with a resolution of 240 x 240. It is easily seen in daylight and has an adjustable backlight. The resolution allows simple graphics and nice colors.

Side view of the Vivoactive 3 Music, notice the cover is slightly raised above the bezel.

The case is a fiber-reinforced polymer with a stainless steel rear cover. The basic 3 has a stainless steel bezel while the 3 Music has a more recessed bezel made of the same polymer and a more protruding top.

The charger port is a four pin recessed, waterproofed plug and is situated underneath. The charge port on the 3 is in a slightly different place under the watch than on the 2 Music, otherwise identical.

The strap is a silicone quick-release 20 mm industry-standard band, and you can find tons of these online for replacements if you don’t like the stock one, or your’s breaks. This is supposed to fit pretty much any wrist size as the band holes cover a good part of the band, any wrist from 127 to 204 mm according to Garmin. The clasp is metal and matches the metal material of the one physical button. If you get a Rose Gold edition, for example, the clasp and physical button are rose gold-colored. As of this posting the Music edition comes in granite blue with rose gold hardware or black with silver hardware and the 3 comes in black with silver hardware, black with slate hardware, white with silver hardware, or white with rose gold hardware and brand new Vivoactive 3 Music with Verizon LTE comes in black with red accents and slate hardware.

The quick release is sure easier to use than the older method of band replacement on earlier Garmin watches that I had, you don’t need any tools or anything – just push the little release rods inward on each part of the band to release it. And the standard is nice too as it opens up a large range of bands that fit.

The physical button is your basic multi-use button and is what you use to open the menu for activities and to start and stop them, etc as well as a few other things. You can also hold it down to access the Controls Menu.

The screen is a touchscreen of course, and seems to be the right amount of sensitive without being overly so. On my old watch the touchscreen made it too easy to pause an activity and then accidentally re-start it or, worse, discard it, with a casual brush of the hand or sleeve. Not so with this watch.

Accessing the settings, history, etc is done via holding your finger momentarily on the touchscreen to bring up menus that you use to navigate to what you want. You can also swipe up and down to access your widgets. There are a number of already installed widgets that you can customize and add you can add more from Garmin Connect IQ as you please. It’s a very powerful system and many widgets have options that you can set via the Garmin Connect app on your phone or the Garmin Express program on your computer.

Water resistance is good to 5 ATM – about 5 atmospheres or 80 PSI, enough for diving to around a hundred thirty feet or forty meters. You can shower with it, immerse it for long periods, etc. Personally, I take it off when showering.

Weight-wise the 3 Music is around 43 grams while the 3 basic is around 39. You barely will notice it weight-wise.

Battery life is rated at seven days for regular none-GPS smartwatch mode, thirteen hours with the GPS on. For a fully charged Vivoactive 3 it’s plenty long enough for any hike or activity I will ever do, but it does need to be charged often after a few activities if you are using the GPS a lot. Battery life could definitely be better though.

I suspect things like having the gesture control of the backlight turned on (which seems to work okay sometimes, other times it just randomly comes on so I keep mine turned off) run the battery down faster. I also decreased the backlight strength. You’ll find that some watch faces that display a lot of data that is also being updated often and will run down the battery a bit faster, more about this later.

There is a low battery reminder, but I would recommend charging the watch well before it gets to that point; to prolong battery life long-term. After all, the battery is non-user-replaceable and the life of the battery can be extended by charging it before it drops into those lower numbers.

The Vivoactive 3/3 Music also has what seems to be a pretty good charge port – I’ve been disappointed in the charger ports on my two previous watches, which seemed to get sweat-soaked and corroded slightly. This is a different design and in some ways a little similar to the Fitbit Charge 2 charge port, which has held up and charged consistently for me through many years of sweat and moisture and use. The Music has it’s charging port at right angles to where it is on the regular non-Music, both have the port on the underside.

If you’re not in the habit of sending your activities to Garmin via the app, or WiFi (for the Music version) or via computer – the memory capacity is seven times activities and fourteen days of activity tracking. According to Garmin this is the same for both watches even though the 3 Music has more memory.

I’m not sure about these specs as a quick connection to the computer with the 3 Music shows eight activities saved, but this seems to be about inconsistent and is around what Garmin says.

For GPS you have the options of enabling or disabling GLONASS for more accuracy – but enabling it will slightly increase your battery usage as it is locking onto a goodly number more GPS sats than the basic US GPS grid. Galileo support also has been recently added, I believe. GPS tracks seem accurate, though a few times slightly off (as happens with any GPS) until it drifts back to

Both versions also have a real barometric altimeter (versus the GPS one that many older watches have) as well as a magnetic compass and the standard accelerometers that are needed for daily activity tracking.

It also has a thermometer, which you can access with various apps and see on your workouts. This is basically useless as it mostly picks up some heat from your wrist – no matter what app I use that offsets the temp from my body this never is accurate as an actual thermometer. It can be a good reference for workouts if you keep this in mind – such as to keep an eye on how fast your body is warming when in an exercise – but as a numerical value it is not very good.

Heart rate sensor and LED’s

The wrist heart rate monitoring is Garmin’s new Elevate system and is Garmin’s version of LED’s and sensors and software for monitoring 24 hour heart rate activity tracking. For specific exercise activity-logging these same HR sensors sample at a much higher rate than the lower and variable sample rate of twenty-four hour monitoring (if you have the automatic option turned on for daily HR monitoring).

This does an excellent job at twenty-four hour monitoring, as well as use during many activities. But if you are doing plyometrics, Martial Arts or Mixed Martial Arts, or possibly running, or anything where your arms is very active; then you may want to consider a chest contact heart rate band or arm band heart rate sensor – any of which will connect to your watch of course. Once you pair them and start an activity the watch automatically picks up the previously paired device and uses it instead of the onboard HR sensors. I recommend something like the Scosche RHYTHM+ HR armband (which I reviewed here before), the newer Scosche Rhythm 24 HR armband, the Garmin Heart Rate Chest Strap or other heart rate straps. For regular road biking and even a regular run the onboard HR sensors work fine, maybe not so much for mountain biking and an intense road biking session and other very active exercises. More about this later under the Fitness/Exercise Logging section.

Connections are via Bluetooth, WiFi, or directly to a computer. Installing watch faces, data fields, etc can be done with either a phone, tablet, or computer via Garmin Connect IQ – kind of like the Google Play Store or iTunes.

Of note here – there IS NO sound whatsoever on these watches, the only notifications are visual and vibration.

When I got the music version I assumed that the entire curved top was part of the touch-activated area. But this is not the case – the outer edges, where it really curves, seem to be purely cosmetic and most of the touch area is similar in area to the non-Music version. Though in use you may find your fingers more smoothly moving over the edges of the touchscreen because of this curvature, but a few simple tests shows that the curved part is inactive.

Usage and Features, Including All-Day Activity Tracking

Maybe it is my imagination but it seems like the Vivoactive 3 Music is smoother in use than the 3 basic. Is this all in my mind or is there perhaps an optimization of software and hardware because of the Music edition being slightly newer? I can’t quantify this in any way though. It also seems as though maybe the battery is slightly better. Again, I have no testing or scientific measure of this, and it’s very subjective and relying on use patterns, and even temperature and cloud cover (when using the GPS), etc. Is the battery the same in both versions? I have no idea.

Many of the smart features of the watch like smart notifications are done via Bluetooth. You can even respond in some simple ways to texts and reject calls, etc and there are customization options for your responses. These work well and the vibration alerts of the watches is good at notifying you without bugging others around you. In addition to texts, notifications can come from Facebook, Garmin, and other things via your phone.

Unfortunately I can’t go into this too much as I don’t use this feature, nor do I use very many of the other non-fitness-related smartwatch functions. Yes, there is Uber, controlling of smart devices, and many other things – some built into the watch and others via apps and widgets that can be installed.

The Vivoactives also do have Garmin Pay but I have never used this so I can’t speak to how well it works or on anything having to do with setting it up, though I would imagine it’s similar to any of the other digital integrated payment methods.

Pairing is done through the Garmin Connect app on your mobile device. If you leave Bluetooth turned on your mobile device the watch automatically occasionally uploads , especially if you make sure the Garmin Connect app is running. You can also just turn on and off the Bluetooth occasionally to upload, on either or both devices to save battery power. There is also the ability in the watch’s setting to do a manual sync if you need to force it. But for me simply turning the Bluetooth on both devices and making sure the Garmin Connect app is pulled up allows it to connect and sync without doing anything else.

The WiFi connection settings are set up via the Connect Mobile App or Garmin Express on a computer. Once you have your network(s) set up you can go into the settings on the watch and do a manual upload when you wish, or set it to auto-upload. Uploads on WiFi, just like Bluetooth or when connected to a computer, includes not only workouts but your day’s activities, sleep, etc up to that point and from your last upload time. I have two separate routers overlapping for my old stone house, and the WiFi seems to connect to whichever one is closest. Occasionally it may error out but moving to a slightly different location usually (but not always) fixes this, or at the worse moving into range of the other router. Occasionally nothing I do will get it to upload via WiFi – I either wait until later or fire up Bluetooth on the phone and the watch. WiFi works quite nicely and this rarely happens, whether manually or with the auto-upload.

BTW, charging is quite fast – with the computer as well as with a wall charger.

Of note here, any Firmware updates will be done via either plugging the watch into the computer or using the Garmin Connect app. You never actually have to plug the watch into your computer for something like this, though I have found that if you install apps from Connect IQ you may need to plug the watch into the computer to adjust options in them, though strangely enough options for Widgets or Data Fields show up in the Garmin Connect app itself, on a mobile device. This is the way my watches work, but I thought that initially the options for apps were available on the Garmin Connect app too. As I said above, Widget and Data Field options are readily available in the app for me, but not the options for Apps – strangely.

Data transfer is fastest with the USB cable, with WiFi coming in second for speed, and Bluetooth trailing in third. A day’s worth of data isn’t going to take that long, but it is noticeable on Bluetooth.

Music screen

Up to five hundred songs can be stored on the 3 Music (the non-Music of course does not store any music), and you are able to fairly quickly swipe over while in an exercise and control your music. It works fine but really there should have been a way to embed/add a music data field to eliminate the single extra step. The best way to do this is through a computer and the included USB cable and Garmin Express. Any standard filetype for music can be transferred, as long as it doesn’t have some sort of copy protection on it. There is a way to transfer music/files via a phone or tablet and using a OTG Cable, the included USB cable, and a file manager on your mobile device; but this is a bit more involved than I want to go into here. But it is do-able.

You can see what is currently playing, skip forward to the next song or back, and shuffle, repeat, adjust volume, use playlists, sort by artists; podcasts; audiobooks; genres; songs; albums, and access music via apps like Deezer and others (no Pandora yet) – you can use your home WiFi to transfer songs from a music streaming service.

Moving on to Widgets – these are little apps that can be accessed by scrolling the screen up and down to find what you are looking for. There are a number of already-installed including a step counter with full daily totals and daily charts, heart rate with charts and average heart rate time, My Day which is an overview of all of your twenty-four hour activity tracking stats, calories burned, distance traveled, intensity minutes, floors, standard calendar, clock, timer, stopwatch, weather, etc. You can also do a Find My Phone and control a Garmin Virb via widgets and apps. This covers the newer Virbs, not the original ones, BTW, like the Virb Elite (there’s also a Find my Watch in the Garmin Connect app, but it is only good to the range of your Bluetooth).

Steps Widget

And there are a lot more you can add – both made by Garmin as well as others, via the Connect IQ store. There are hundreds of free widget apps, and some which require a small purchase or are demos/trials for paid versions. But there are tons of free ones of all sorts.

I think there may be a bit of confusion with the whole Garmin Connect IQ thing. The heading for the categories of things that can be installed on the watch are under “App Type” but then there are “Device Apps” (things like running, biking, navigating, etc), Data Fields (which can be added to stock apps like Run, Bike), Widgets (discussed above – which are accessed via your up/down swipe on the main watch screen), Watch Faces, and Music-related apps.

Installing is easy via the Garmin Connect mobile app or Garmin Express when connected to a computer. You can’t accidentally install a Device App if it’s not made for your watch and you can select by device type, app, data field, watch face, widget, etc as well as search for specific kinds of apps by name/subject.

It’s good to read the info about each device app as some like some Watch Faces may require a restart (or two) or sometimes even other apps to be installed, or require special settings or use of external mobile apps in a few cases (like Maps). This is generally the minority though.

The floors climbed that the watch detects seems to be off for me, somewhat low while my wife gets what may be a somewhat higher normal than she thinks she should be getting (my wife informs me that her floors are now displaying correctly – firmware update perhaps?). This is one place that Garmin needs improvement on.

Advanced sleep monitoring is another of the features the The Vivoactive 3 series track and this seems to have vastly improved over time. There’s no installed widgets on the watch for showing any sleep display like there is for many other things, but you can find the advanced stats on Garmin Connect and through your Garmin Connect app. This is quite involved; monitoring periods of movement and restful sleep, REM sleep, etc.

Sleep Screen on Garmin Connect app

For health stat junkies things like the above will be right up your alley. For the most part you will find some nice advanced stats available through this watch via Garmin Connect, for everything from heart rate monitoring to sleep to steps and more.

The watch itself as well as the Garmin Connect app will show you an estimated VO2 Max – the measurement of the maximum amount of oxygen that a person can utilize during an exercise, which is a good measurement of your body’s ability to consume oxygen. To access it go to My Stats, then VO2 Max, if you have done any good walking or a run it will display it here and/or you can do a quick test to determine this estimation. This can be found by swiping up from the VO2 Max screen and selecting TEST NOW. This is usually a mile or half mile but when I did the VO2 Max test it gave me an estimation in much less – possibly because it already had a VO2 Max estimation from running and walking a lot before I tried the built-in test.

On the Garmin Connect app itself you will also find a Fitness Age calculation under the same screen where you find VO2 Max in the Garmin Connect App (under Performance Stats). This shows only under “VO2 Max” but not under Cycling VO2 Max.

VO2 Max on Garmin Connect

Another of the widgets that some (maybe a lot) of people may find of interest is the one that monitors your Stress Level. This also, like most of the other stat widgets, has a graph showing levels during the day. Sometimes when scrolling to it you may find that it wants to do a quick test, which last thirty seconds or a minute, and if you find yourself not able to lower your level you can do some deep breathing exercises perhaps, or consider other approaches to decreasing your stress.

There is an abnormal HR option (accessed via the Sensors and Accessories setting on the watch and under “Heart Rate”) for turning on the watch’s ability to monitor you for abnormal heart rate. As this is under the “Heart Rate” screen in the sensors screen I am wondering if this will check for abnormal heart rate using ANY heart rate monitor you are using at the time, not just the wrist mounted onboard one? I am guessing this is how it works but can not say for sure. Anyway, interestingly enough there was a false alarm on my wife’s Vivoactive once, never repeated, immediately after she did a run on the treadmill – so I am wondering if this COULD be thrown off by a number of variables that may create a false positive. I’ve yet to experience one, though I have heard that others have also, to the point where they turn this option off. And remember that the Garmin Vivoactive 3 series are not actual medical devices so you do have to use your judgement on interpreting the results.

Stress Level Widget

Along the lines of steps and daily exercise there is also a move bar (option) and vibration that lets you know if you have been sedentary for too long. For those of us who sit for periods at a computer this can be a great reminder to get up and move around. Sitting is the new ‘soda pop’, ya know. This generally works well and will show you when you have cleared it too, by getting some movement and steps in. But sometimes it does work a bit flaky, in general though it is quite useful.

Goal achievements are also shown and attention is called to them by a vibration. This can be steps, stairs, intensity minutes, etc and this option can be turned off altogether or switched to toggle off automatically off when in an activity and back on afterward. You can also leave it to learn your activity level and assign auto-goals, which works fairly well.

History and My Stats are two things I use often, accessed like most things by a simple touch and scroll. History shows you exercise stats and totals and My Stats show VO2 Max and your personal records and Resting HR. There are many options and settings accessed via the touch and scroll.

Controls Menu Example Configuration

You can shortcut things like turning on and off the Bluetooth, manually, syncing, and many others things in the Controls Menu – which you bring up by holding down the physical button on the side of the watch for a second or so (longer than the single press needed to bring up the activities menu). You can customize the Controls Menu in the app. More about the Controls Menu later.

You can use the Garmin Express program on your computer or the Garmin Connect app on your mobile device to customize many of the settings for the watch. The options for settings may even be overwhelming to some, there are quite a few. A definite positive in my book.

The watch, both versions, have a fair amount of activity storage if you don’t upload your data right away. Supposedly it will store seven timed activities and fourteen days of activity tracking data. On my 3 Music the numbers of activities kept onboard vary, I’m not sure how the watch decides this but it is around seven or more at any given time.

This doesn’t mean that you can load as many Connect IQ things as you like – there is space set aside for music (on the Music version of course) and space set aside for Connect IQ things but they are separate storage, it seems, allotted that way anyway. The extra space of the 3 Music did give me breathing room to try lots of things and have extra space for things I wanted to test temporarily, as well as space for things that I might not use all the time but would like available in addition to the apps I want to keep and use permanently.

Stock Garmin watch face with customization of step display.

It also seems that certain watch faces or configurations for watch faces use more power – which makes sense. If your watch face is showing your heart rate, an animated second-hand, live elevation, and especially anything that may involve the GPS (like lat/lon), etc all at the same time it is going to be using more battery power than a plainer one with less info. A trade-off here of course. The number of watches faces is daunting (as is the number of Data Fields, Apps, and Widgets) but after messing with a bunch of the watch faces I settled on one of the default ones as my main watch face – the default Garmin ones can usually be also customized too. I used a basic one but added a step count to it (as you can see in the photo to the left).

One of the great things about Garmin’s Connect IQ – which is similar to a version of the Itunes and Google Play store for downloading apps – is that many of the apps and data fields can overcome some of the limitations inherent in the watch as well as add great flexibility and customizations to the watch in general.

Connect IQ as well as the Garmin Connect app have really matured and gotten better and better over time, as I may have mentioned. The analyzation and display of data in Garmin Connect is amazing. With data presentation and tracking and considering that with some things Garmin is a bit of ‘newcomer’ in monitoring, like steps and sleep, it sometimes is coming to rival or surpass more established companies, like Fitbit.

There is a backlight that can be turned on by swiping or when you touch the faceplate. I decreased the strength of this from the default as well as the timeout period to help conserve battery power, just because I didn’t need it as bright. I also turned off something called gesture control, which is SUPPOSED to come on when you turn your wrist towards you, in practice this seemed to come on randomly during arm movements, or while lying in bed, etc so I turned it off. No loss really. My Fitbit Charge 2 also had this ability and again, this seemed a bit random and somewhat of a battery waster.

Unfortunately the Vivoactive 3 series doesn’t give you cute little messages when you put it back on or take it off the charger, or reach a goal, like some of the Fitbits do. Oh wait, my wife said that she has seen one – perhaps a new firmware upgrade?

I also recommended cleaning the band and clasp occasionally with soap and water, I had a bit of a little rash near the clasp but an occasional soap and water cleaning of the band took care of any problem I had. And I am not sure if it was actually a rash or reaction or whether it was just from having the band too loose on my arm.

Fitness/Exercise Logging

There were two things I wanted the Vivoactive 3 for – all-day activity tracking and specific fitness/exercise logging, like running and biking and others. Of which each separately would replace my old Garmin Forerunner 620 and my Fitbit Charge 2, both of which served me faithfully for many years. Perhaps I was a bit cursory in my covering of the all-day activity tracking above, but it indeed does it’s job well, has a lot of stats and options, but is similar to what you would find on other all-day activity trackers.

So as I mentioned above the all-day activity tracking works quite well and the fitness/exercise logging does also.

Is it perfect? No, there certainly is room for improvements and changes to make it even better and things that I wish Garmin had done differently. Some of which are probably just my own personal preferences and wishes.

But it does work nicely, and in most cases my own personal nitpicks can be overcome by installing an app or data field. I think Garmin could have given us a bit more freedom for options and what can be displayed at any one time with a simple increase in memory/programming magic for the Vivoactive 3/3 Music. But I don’t know what kind of design and programming challenges Garmin faced/faces when making something like this.

To enter the mode to record your exercises, rides, runs, etc you press the physical button on the side momentarily (holding it down longer brings up the Controls Menu instead), which brings up your Apps/Fitness Activities list.

If it’s the first time that you have done any activities on the watch you can select which ones you want to be your favorites. You can still access everything (unless you uninstall one in Garmin Connect, which you can re-install easily enough) but your favorites show up as soon as you press the physical button. If you have a lot of favorites you can scroll up and down through them using the touchscreen.

Indoor Rowing app

In the example at left (the stock Indoor Rowing app) you can see that there are four Data Fields shown. You can change how many Data Fields are displayed in each app/fitness activity, ranging from one to four in each and you can have anywhere from one to three total screens per app/fitness activity, with the HR Zone Gauge screen as an additional screen if desired.

Unlike the rest of the screens the HR Zone Gauge screen can’t be customized. The HR Zone Gauge shows what zone you are in via a gauge-like screen with your heart rate in the middle. You can edit your heart rate zones in the Garmin Connect App or online with Garmin Connect, but no other options are available for this particular screen unlike the others.

There are many built-in fitness apps like Run, Bike, Indoor Bike, Walk, Treadmill Run, Indoor Walk, Cardio, Strength Training with rep counting, Elliptical Training (your results may vary with this – many people – me included – don’t seem to have much luck with this. I just use Indoor Walk and switch it to Elliptical in Garmin Connect), Stair Stepper, Floor Climbing, Indoor Rowing, Yoga, Skiing, Snowboard, XC Skiing, Stand Up Paddleboard, Row, Indoor Row, and more.

Pool swim is another, where you can set the length of the pool (from presets as well as custom) and it calculates your pool metrics like stroke type detection and swim efficiency using the built-in accelerometer as you swim. Unfortunately there is no open water swim on this watch (only a few Garmin watches seem to have this, like the Garmin Swim or Garmin Instinct) – perhaps some variation of DC Rainmaker’s technique for tagging the Vivoactive 3 along the surface via a tethered flaoting bag or something might work with a specific marked distance?

Unfortunately Garmin did not see fit to include Training Effect on the Vivoactive series. Not a big deal I suppose – you can find comparable information from your other watch metrics, but it would have been a nice inclusion. Even my older Forerunner had this.

TrueUp, a fairly new feature, is included. This allows syncing of data between multiple Garmin devices – say if you switch from your watch to a bike computer. Any relevant data is synced between the devices when they are connected. A personal biking distance or speed record done on your Garmin bike computer will show up under your records on your watch, or daily activity stats recorded with your Vivoactive 3 will show up on your Fenix 5, etc.

Run options

Some of the activities also give you the option of advanced workouts like Garmin Workouts and Structured Training Plans that can be set up in Garmin Connect and downloaded. Some apps/activities give you various options, like in the Run app. For Run this includes Run/Walk if you are just starting out or doing a long run and need occasional breaks, and others. The Run fitness app also lets you calibrate treadmill distances, though it is supposed to do some self-calibration after your first outdoor run(s). Indoor Track is also a separate fitness app.

Most of the Fitness apps also have auto pause, auto lap, manual lap, lap alerts, auto scroll, and you also have the ability for touch and button lock. All pretty self-explanatory I think.

Customizable alerts are another excellent feature for some, with heart rate zone alerts, calorie, drink, eat, turn around, go home, calories, in addition to the ones you would expect like distance and speed and time, etc. Some of these can be very powerful motivators, or useful from a health standpoint and of course for training.

Any of the Data Fields can be changed to any number of built-in data points like speed, distance, Sunset, elevation, etc – there are many. In addition additional Data Fields can be downloaded from Garmin Connect IQ. And each separate fitness activity/app can have a differing number of Data Fields and various options.

But the above is not without some limitations, but depending on your preferences and purposes for the watch you may or may not ever be affected nor even notice by these limitations I am going to mention.

Firstly, the number of Data fields you select are the same on all screens for each particular exercise/fitness app, not including the HR Zone Gauge. If you want your first screen to show four Data Fields and then the next screen to just show your speed in nice large letters you can’t do this without a little futzing around with adding a Connect IQ app (more about that in a bit).

Secondly you are limited somewhat in what built-in Data Fields that you can add in the top and bottom Data Field, my guess is that this has to do with the fact that these are displaying in a smaller, more rounded space and Garmin did not want to squash too much into there. But I am guessing here. For example if for Run you selected four Data Fields for your Run data screens only the middle two can have any of the built-in Data Fields and the top and bottom are limited to a certain subset of Data Fields, if you selected three Data Fields the middle one can have any of the built-in Data Fields, and if you selected two or one Data Field any of them can have any of the built-in Data Fields.

Fortunately these limitations can sometimes be gotten around by using a Garmin Connect IQ Data field. Many times you can find something that will stuff multiple bits of specific data that you might want displayed into one of the Data Fields that you can’t with the stock Data Fields or that is limited by the number , and sometimes you can find some nice customizable data fields that can ‘take over’ one screen of that particular fitness activity/app, giving you more control or showing you exactly the data you want.

The All in One app

The procedure here for using a Connect IQ Data Field to take over one screen of a particular fitness app is to select ‘one’ as the number of Data Fields for the screens in the fitness activity/app and then go into the options and add the Connect IQ Data Field that you want to display full-screen. See the example at the right – this one is called All in One by Peterdedecker and is a full customizable, somewhat free-form Data Field allowing you to put pretty much anything into the spaces provided, overcoming the four Data Field limitation of the watch (this one is free but the author accepts donations – give a few bucks, it’s a great Data Field).

In the scenario I mentioned a few paragraphs back – wanting a range of Data Fields on one screen yet having one set aside for the display of just one large one – you can do this using a Connect IQ app like the above as you are able to add any of the built-in Data Fields to the subsequent screens as well as another Connect IQ Data FIeld. In fact you could add another Connect IQ Data Field with even more data somewhat like your first screen, or any variation.

This is where another limitation comes in – even though you can have as up to four Data Fields per screen (up to the limitations discussed above) – you can only have two Connect IQ Data Fields per fitness activity/app. My guess is that this has to do with the watch’s memory and system limitations. So you can have as many Connect IQ Data Fields installed as your watch will hold, but you can only add two per each separate fitness app.

Built-in apps

In addition to adding Data Fields to existing workout apps (and in some cases replacing them with a full screen Data Field) you can also download many other apps/fitness activities as well as things like mapping, navigation, etc that do not add to or replace Data Fields but show up as a new, separate fitness app/app.

I want to mention here, one of the built-in apps is Garmin’s Navigation which is great to have handy as it can be invoked at any time – inside an existing app or separately – to navigate you to saved Waypoints or back to the beginning of your activity. This is something that I would recommend everyone try out and get used to using in case of emergency or when needed. This will not navigate you back using routing like a car GPS or Google Maps but it will point you in the right direction. And you can start it anytime to get back to your beginning point or a Waypoint. Heck, if you think you might lose your car in a large parking lot you can save it as a Waypoint…

Duplicating the built-in apps is also an option. Say you want to use the Run app for your regular running but you want to use something like the Connect IQ Race Screen app when you do a running race. So if you duplicate the RUN app you would have the original RUN app and a Run 2 app. Unfortunately there is absolutely no way to change the name of the duplicated apps, it just adds a number after it.

One of the most useful safety features that works with the Vivoactive 3 series in conjunction with the Garmin Connect app on your phone is Livetrack. With Livetrack you can share your real-time info; including location, speed, distance, elevation, HR, activity time and any ANT+ sensor data (like from a heart rate strap or band) with friends or family or acquaintances, or as Garmin mentions – your fans You start Livetrack in the Garmin Connect app and, obviously; you must be planning on doing an activity that uses the GPS. Livetrack uses the GPS on your watch and your phone’s cellular signal to allow others to see your location and keep updated, and stats. If you are trying to use Livetrack an area with bad GPS it will only show your last location(s), or may be spotty.

Manual start or AutoStart for Livetrack are options, with AutoStart all future activities will automatically start LiveTrack. Nice if you tend to forget to start it.

Also, your LiveTrack info can be shared directly to some Garmin devices that are compatible and this also ties into Strava Beacon (if you happen to have the proper Strava subscription).

Specific-Exercise Heart Rate Monitoring

Earlier in this blog review I mentioned going over more about using the onboard heart rate monitoring for specific exercises. As I said – the daily twenty-four hour monitoring of the wrist-based onboard heart rate sensors work just fine, for specific fitness activities the onboard wrist-based heart rate sensors capture data at a higher data rate than the daily monitoring does.

HR LED’s

Depending on your activities, how active you are and specifically how much you move your arm and hands, and how accurate you need you heart rate monitoring you may find that for certain activities you may want to have an external heart rate sensor instead of using the onboard one.

It very much is going to depend on your own preferences, needs, and what you do and how you do it.

Frankly, some people will have absolutely no need for another heart rate sensor no matter what they do with the watch. You may not have a need for a higher level of accuracy, or you may not do anything that causes the onboard wrist HR sensors to lose a little data once in a while, or the small amount of variability caused by wrist movement that affects the HR sensors may be so small that it is not important nor measureable for your particular purposes, or it just may not matter to you very much. I am guessing for most people the built-in HR sensors will be just fine.

For me I mostly am interested in the data and have a bit of an obsession with accuracy. But for walks, hikes, Yoga, casual runs and casual/recovery bike rides I use the built-in heart rate sensors and it works for me, but for more intense rides, runs, Plyometrics and sometimes Mixed Martial Arts I use the Scosche RHYTHM+ HR armband for higher accuracy.

Wrist-based Heart rate sensors work by illuminating your capillaries (through your skin) with LED(s), a sensor(s) beside the LED(s) measures the frequency at which your blood is pumping through the capillaries. A few calculations by algorithms on the watch and you have a pretty accurate heart rate.

The problem with wrist-based heart rate sensors, of any type from any manufacturer, is that any higher degree of arm movement may (or may not) skew the reception of this light bounced off your skin from the LED(s) – either by letting some of the light escape, which can throw off the algorithm), or letting in external spurious light that can also throw off the reception of the wavelengths used to detect the flow of blood in your capillaries. The other issue, which shouldn’t affect most of us very appreciatively, is that the blood may have slowed down some by the time it gets to the wrist.

As you can see below from a snippet of a treadmill run – there is a little difference for me during this run, but not much. For the watch I cinched the strap slightly tighter than I normally wear it, and for the comparison external and known-accurate sensor I used the Wahoo Fitness App on a Samsung Galaxy S7 via ANT+ for the Scosche HR Armband data logging.

As you can see there is a slightly higher variability in the onboard HR sensor compared armband sensor – but is this a true comparison of the sampling of data showing some differences with the built-in HR due to light leakage/infiltration as I move my wrist or is the difference more due to 1) the differing algorithm in the Scosche 2) the differing algorithm in the Wahoo 3) an effect [and/or sampling rate smoothing] of the time it takes the phone to receive the data via ANT+?

HR comparisons

For the most part the built-in HR works fine for most things I do, outside of MMA, and doing more strenuous targeting training in running and such.

You’ll also find that there is an option to rebroadcast the heart rate from the watch HR sensors to an external device – this could be a bike computer, a phone, or what-have-you and saves you having to use another heart rate sensor in those situations. Note that it does take a fair amount of extra battery power when you rebroadcast. There are two modes; full-time and in activity only. The rebroadcast was quickly picked up by both my Samsung phone’s ANT+ as well as the Garmin ANT+ USB stick that I tested it on, plugged into a computer., as well as my Garmin Edge 520 Plus bike GPS.

As an example of battery usage one day I was around 73% of battery power and needed to use the heart rate rebroadcast for my Garmin Edge 520 Plus as I had forgotten my heart rate arm band and after a two and half hour ride I still had about 52% battery power on the watch. So not bad really.

One notable exception/caveat here; for those bicyclists out there – there is no ‘official’ bike power sensor meter display and recording – though it will connect to a power meter. Fortunately there are Apps and Data Fields created by others that allow the display of power with a power sensor that is connected, like the ANT+ Power Meter Data Field by takura87 and others. This Data Field has a way to insert the data into the .FIT file that the watch uses and uploads. Unfortunately despite the app showing power and saving neither the data the watch itself nor Garmin Connect can not use this information for calculating VO2 max and other factors. Why did Garmin not include this capability natively?

Connecting to sensors is very easy and quick, and if you have one that has both Bluetooth and ANT+ you can select which you want it to connect through. I prefer ANT+ as I believe that it has faster data transfer (or processing) but Bluetooth is more secure.

Sensors connected

One thing to remember here is that when you connect a sensor of any sort – if it is powered up it will be used by whatever fitness app you are using. If you have a couple of bikes with cadence sensors on them and you’ve previously connected both – you don’t want to inadvertently jiggle the bike you’re not riding as that sensor might come out of power down and be the first one the watch picks up. I would have liked to see the ability to pick the sensors that each fitness app uses, but despite this I have yet to have any problems like the scenario mentioned above.

An addendum to the above 3/10/19 – I have been told but have not had opportunity to try this; if the wrong sensor connects you can go into the Settings, Sensor & Accessories and manually connect the proper sensor thus taking precedence over the one you did not want to connect. This of course only applies if the wrong sensor connected is of the same category as the one that you did want connected i.e wrong cadence sensor versus the correct one, etc.

On some forums I have seen that occasionally people have a feature that is not working on their watch, or not working correctly. Or everything may be working initially but over time some feature or option seems to have stopped working or be a bit off, or there may be a lockup, something that doesn’t install correctly, etc.

As with any electronics and software the first thing you want to do is shut the piece of electronics off, then turn it back on. In this case with the Vivoactive 3’s you can press and hold the side button to access the Controls Menu and press the Power icon, or hold down the side button down until it shuts down.

If you are totally locked up never fear – you may have to hold the button down for a good period of time but it will eventually shut down. Leave it powered off for a few moments (or longer) and then press the side button to restart it and see if the problem is fixed.

If you are still having issues you may have to reset the watch to factory settings. Again, this is pretty standard on any Garmin or other electronics including phones, tablet, whatever. Restart, then reset and a good number of problems are fixed this way.

To reset the watch try to make sure your day’s data is uploaded, and then hold your finger down on the face, scroll down to Settings, then down to System, and finally down to Reset. Here you have the option of resetting to default settings or to delete your data and reset settings. Usually at this point you want to select your last option, though you can try the first and see what happens and come back to it if you are still having problems. You will have to set a number of things back up but personal activity settings and info will be picked back up from Garmin Connect, for apps and such you probably want to plug it into a computer and use Garmin Express – you should see previously installed apps and data fields and such there that you can re-install. All their settings will need to be re-done.

Accessories, Favorite Apps, Vivoactive Future, and Conclusion

A quick mention here – for another review of these watches check out DC Rainmaker’sVivoactive 3 Review and Vivoactive 3 Music review. He covers some very thorough comparisons and tests of the heart rate, location, and other aspects; his stuff is excellent and exhaustive and worth a read if you are considering this watch, or anything electronic and fitness-related for that matter.

There are a few accessories for the Vivoactive 3 series.

Probably the most notable accessories are the multitude of bands of all types including metal, plastic, nylons, leather, canvas, mesh, and more, Garmin makes some and there are a lot of third-party companies which make compatible bands. Any 20 mm band will work with it in fact. Bands are interchangeable between the 3 and 3 Music.

Glass or plastic covers are also one of the most popular Vivoactive 3 accessories it seems. Despite the watch face/cover of the Vivoactive 3 series being Gorilla Glass it can still be damaged. Because the cover on the 3 is flat and the cover on the 3 Music is curved on top the screen shields made for one don’t necessarily fit (perfectly) on the other.

For the 3 you can get plastic or glass covers for it like the Kimilar tempered glass screen protector – which is one of the easiest most bubble-free device covers I have ever put on. It’s extremely clear and clean and works great, no decrease of sensitivity when using to the touch screen whosoever. It does fit the 3 Music but goes only on the flat part, the curved edges are not covered, and it is slightly raised so it is possible that it may catch on clothing or other things. It works but is not the best option unless you really need a glass one for the 3 Music – I have yet to see one for the 3 Music that is glass (though you will find some that say they are – if you have found a REAL legitimate curved glass cover please contact me).

Skinomi Techskin cover shield

For the Vivoactive 3 Music check out the Skinomi Techskin screen protector. This takes a little bit of time to get right as it must curve down around the curved edges and you must put a few minutes into it, working it around until it stick (not a big deal but more than just plopping it on and saying you’re done). Once done it also does not decrease the touch sensitivity and provides a semi-self-healing ability when scratched. So, make sure you read the instructions and follow them exactly and this one will work great. See the photo at left – the cover is barely discernible.

There are a few case/bezel covers too, though none specifically for the Vivoactive 3 Music, but the ones made for Vivoactive 3 fit either.

In the photo below are the only two cases I have found (also shown is the charger port plug). The one on the left is a very soft and flexible silicone cover, and it wraps around and covers some of the curved sides, which may provide some protection. Unfortunately this cover is so soft that many times it is pulled out of shape and to the side if something brushes over it. Still good protection and stays in place in general, but this momentary movement may decrease the protection. The one on the right is a harder plastic and stays in place perfectly, but unfortunately does not completely come up over the curved edges, though its own plastic edge rises to the level of the top of the watch face so it is some good protection in general.

In my opinion the one on the right is a bit better but I wish the edges encroached more over the curvature – though for those who like the curved edge for the movement of the finger over it, they might prefer this one over the other. The left one can be installed without taking the band off but the one on the right does require that – of course with the quick release band it is quite easy; just push the little quick release rods in on the bands and slip them off.

For the regular Vivoactive 3 the one on the left has an open space for the charge port and the one on the right covers and slightly seals the charger port, it must be flipped out of the way to charge. When using them on the Vivoactive 3 Music the one to the left must have the silicone moved aside a little to access the charge port (very easy), the one on the right has an open space where the charge port is.

Bezel covers and charger plug

Another accessory is a silicone anti-dust/anti-sweat plug (seen above – the little yellow plug near the top) for the charging port. While the port seems to be designed much better than some of my Garmin watches it still can be prone to nasty sweat secretions building up in that space. So far, this plug has worked nicely for this, and is easily removed for charging. Since this is the same charging port used on a few different Garmin watches these plugs are plentiful. These come in a bunch of colors but I have had to go to eBay to get just one at a time. Are they totally waterproof and sweat-proof? So far so good.

The Vivoactive series has been around for a while now and with the 3 series they continue to evolve. Garmin is just releasing (as of the first draft of this post in early 2019) a Vivoactive 3 Music Connected (Verizon LTE) version which allows a direct connect to the Verizon network – so you can respond to texts without having your phone with you, download music without your phone, and have incident detection while using certain fitness apps, which automatically send an alert to contacts if something happens as well as allow you to activate assistance manually in an emergency. This one also has a different color scheme available.

Made with the Garmin Face-It app

My wife uses the Garmin Face It app (there is a version for both Android and IOS, iPhone) and created a custom clock face on her Vivoactive 3 Music. This allows you to add your own background photo and slightly customize the clock face options.

I thought I would mention and link to some of my favorite Connect IQ watch faces, Widgets, Data Fields, and Apps here.

There are a ton of great watch faces, though I have settled on one of the stock Garmin ones (which I have customized with a step display using the watch’s settings for that watch face). Unfortunately the more things you add to your watch face that needs to be updated the more power battery power it will take, though it is relatively low for the most part.

I do sometimes use GearMin (which allows you nearly any conceivable option and data display on your watch face), MagicDust (again, many options and visually very nice), and Sport Master (by Garmin, visually appealing but not a lot of options), Time Flies, and Simple Heart (if you need your heart rate displayed all the time).

For widgets I use Compass and GPS Heading Widget (for a quick compass), To-Do Notes (you can even enter notes right on the watch, and check off items as you need), and Notes (you need to enter notes in the Garmin Connect app, very free-form). And of course I use the built-in widgets quite often.

For activities and apps my favorites are Hike 2+ (which adds the missing HIKE activity to the watch and includes highly customizable multi-screens showing any metric you like as well as a map, waypoints with alerts, graph screen for HR and altitude and much more), and the BF series including BF Hiker Map (very similar to the above and with a route map), BF Cycle Map (similar in functioning to the above, specific for biking), BF Runner Map (again, similar to the above but for running, you’ll also find a XC Ski and Indoor app along the same lines).

For Data Fields I use All in One (which has separate settings for biking, running, and other – which means it can replace or augment the existing built-in apps for those things and shows the data in the way you selected in the way you configured it automatically for the app you are inserting it into. This is also the ONLY app I have found that will display running pace and speed at the same time), Single Field (very similar to the above one, maybe a bit more colorful), Chart Data Field (adds a map to the watch screen for any activity), mapField (real navigation for the watch, must be set up on the website beforehand), Current Gradient (a simple gradient display, good for bike hill climbing), Elevation Chart (just like the name says, again; good for biking or running hills), Back to Start (yes, points you back to where you began and shows distance, similar to the Garmin Navigate Data Field). The Garmin built-in Navigate Data Field that is available for GPS activities is excellent and well-worth getting to know. With it you can save waypoints (unfortunately you can not edit their names but only their icons), navigate to a waypoint or your starting position.

You will find hundreds more of all types, some free, some not. Some are limited time demos or are demos that have features limited to show you what the paid full-featured versions have.

One thing to keep in mind here with the Connect IQ apps and data fields is that you do want to thoroughly test them before you use them, in the very unlikely event of a crash for some reason. And some of the watch faces, especially, can require one or two restarts of the watch before they appear.

So…my conclusion. While there are a few small features lacking that I would have liked – I very highly recommend the Garmin Vivoactive 3 or Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music for a wide range of users. From those who want to casually keep track of their all-day activities to those who want some more heavier-duty and specific fitness logging and smartwatch abilities, and anything in between.

As time goes on I plan on adding to and editing this post as I use the watch more and more.

]]>https://randombitsbytes.com/review-garmin-vivoactive-3-music-vivoactive-3/feed/18646Review – Roswheel Attack Bike Frame Baghttps://randombitsbytes.com/review-roswheel-attack-bike-frame-bag/
https://randombitsbytes.com/review-roswheel-attack-bike-frame-bag/#respondThu, 08 Nov 2018 13:45:34 +0000http://randombitsbytes.com/?p=7419I’m by no means a minimalist cyclist – the kind who jumps on his bike with nothing but the clothes on his back and rides off. I have a good-sized seat bag filled with the things that I need for minor repairs and flat fixes, my phone fits in…

But otherwise I don’t normally carry anything else. I don’t go hundreds or thousands of miles on tour, ride somewhere to shop or buy groceries, nor ride to camp or stay overnight. I don’t even take my lunch very often while biking.

Not normally, but occasionally I do have a need to carry something somewhere or from one place to another or to drop something off that won’t fit in a bike jersey or the expandable seat bag, or extra supplies like food and tubes for a longer trip or lunch for a day trip.

Most of the bags I have are larger bags but sometimes if I am not traveling far I’ll just throw whatever I need to carry into a backpack – though that certainly isn’t a good option for long distance as it very quickly gets sweaty and heavy on the back.

Despite the moderate price the absolute first thing I noticed was how well-built and heavy-duty this bag is, as soon as I opened the packing and package containing it. You would think that it was a hundred-dollar plus item. Not only does it seem and look well-made out of quality materials but the whole bag concept is quite well thought-out in its design.

It’s made of a waterproof (yes it is waterproof – not just water-resistant) double-walled lining. In fact it almost feels insulated because of this, and it does seem to offer some rudimentary insulating abilities to whatever is inside. The interior is a plasticky waterproof blue nylon material while the outside is a diamond-latticed nylon material, from a distance it looks almost like leather.

The zipper teeth are made of nylon, but fairly heavy-duty, and has a sealed overlapped ridge along the inside for more waterproofing abilities, and the outside has a unique cover or material completely over the length of the zipper. I’m not sure how it opens and closes so easily with this covering the zipper but it does – unlike some cheaper bags and items with zippers that you have to be very careful with opening and closing this slides along quite easily. The zipper slider and puller parts are aluminum with little lanyard and a rubber part on the end for easy opening and closing. One of my zipper pullers kind of tapped lightly against the zipper itself as I rode when I first got it, which for a short time drove me crazy as I thought something was clicking on my bike. A spot of hot glue in that one place on the zipper pull was all that was needed. Not a complaint here, just a little idiosyncrasy on my particular set up.

The inside is so waterproofed that I almost think that you could fill this with water and it would hold it pretty well

The bag itself is about three litters of capacity and along the bottom is another zippered section (again, the same zipper format as the main access to the interior) which folds out, giving the overall capacity another liter of storage and a full triangular shape when deployed.

For me this was somewhat of a selling point but in reality the water bottle holder would have to be completely removed from the bike for this additional section to be opened fully so it really was of no use to me. For colder weather riding or when you have alternative water bottle mounts this might be good for some.

Unfortunately even without the bag expanded fully the bag still encroaches into the space above one bottle holder, making the only way to put a water bottle in that bottle holder is to use a very short bottle, at best. I normally ride with two water bottles no matter what time of year I ride so it has limited my use of this otherwise excellent bag. For me I really miss having two large, tall water bottles so I tend to only use this bag for shorter trips where I am taking my lunch somewhere not all that far away or transporting something to the nearest city, or whatever. Possibly on other bikes and kinds of bikes where the bottle holders are may be less obstructed by the bag.

The way it can be configured is that it is meant to be snugged up against the down tube in front, but it works just as well pushed back up against the seat tube in back too. But again, in either position it still limits the use or height of a water bottle in one place or the other.

Putting aside my disappointment in losing a water bottle space while using it – otherwise the bag is absolutely excellent.

The nose has a fully waterproof padded part, making it look like it could comfortably travel through water on the prow of a boat. On one side of this piece, if you lift it slightly away from the rest of the bag, you’ll find an overlapped access hole for a water bottle hydration pack tube. This is kind of cool in that it would be a great way to take extra water during those mega-hot days we have in this area sometimes, with the bag providing some insulation too. Between a hydration pack and maybe some slim water bottles stored inside with the triangular expansion part deployed you’d make up for the missing water bottle and much, much more. I did slide my hydration bladder into this and extended the tube through the outlet hole, just to see how it fit but did not use it for more than testing.

Along one side of the bag are two mesh pockets, tight but open at the top. Good for notes, keys, car remote, maybe notes on directions or what-have-you. They’re large enough where you could stick your keys or car remote down into them and not worry about them falling out, though if you were mountain biking you’d probably want to stick anything of value inside.

Inside, as I mentioned above, is the clearly waterproofed blueish nylon and a pair of large Velcro pieces and a detachable divider that can be arranged anywhere in any position (or left out entirely). It gives you a lot of space, it is about three inches wide, but it’s surprising how much you can fit into it and if needed it will bulge and still stay secure. If you are carrying a lot of smaller things the divider works well to give it some stiffness even if you don’t necessarily need the divider for, er, dividing things.

I carried a number of things in it, and also tried a number of things for testing purposes (that I did not actually carry anywhere). Things I carried – lunch, extra light clothes rolled up (you can’t carry a pair of jeans or anything like that), bike parts that I was selling to someone, extra bike parts and tools, large battery packs and cords, phone, and pepper-spray (bike-specific). Things I put in it just to see if they would fit but did not ride with – hydration bladder, more clothes, pistol, and a brick – just to see how stable it was riding around my yard with the extra weight; it held it securely.

The Roswheel logo itself has reflective properties for night use. Unfortunately there are no other reflective surfaces, but putting reflective tape on it is always an option.

To attach the bag to the bike there is a strap around the entire perimeter of the bag; top, bottom, and sides, sewed at intervals to the bag creating flat loops. Then there are multiple Velcro straps that can be slid through these loops at any point(s) around the bag and then wrapped around and Velcroed to the bike tubes. This means that it is almost infinitely variable in attachment options. There are also plenty of straps so if you have a large, beefy top bar or down tube you can Velcro two straps together to fit around it, or pretty much anything else that you wish. On my Kona Esatto the down tube is quite large and I did need to attach two of the Velcro straps to each other to fit around it.

It fit the bike perfectly but my Specialized Pitch MTB with its angled geometry was a bit less of a good fit, but still was fine. You could also use your own Velcro or other strapping to hold it in place too.

On the Kona, which is what I tested it on mostly, the bag stayed in place even with cross winds and didn’t sway a bit. Even when I stood up going up hills and really tilted the bike aggressively to either side as I peddled in an attempt to make it sway.

My knees don’t touch it, which I was a bit concerned about. And while it’s not that large, it does present a bit of an increased cross-section but really I didn’t notice any resistant while riding in cross winds. I did not try it fully deployed in high cross-winds, only configured normally.

I attempted an experiment in mounting it upside down on top of the top bar, as well as right-side up on the top bar. With it snugged up against the stem and Velcroed tightly there it only moves a little but it is hard to come to a stop and put the feet down of course, as there is little room for the crotch in front of it above the top bar. I also tried it back against the seat post, which created a more less-swaying attachment. But again – not really practical to get off the bike at a stop sign or light with it in this position.

This configuration does allow for both water bottle holders to be used with large bottles and also does show how configurable this bag is in general. But it’s not the most favorable position for it, it’s really made for under the top bar – a place where it fits perfectly and stays 100% securely.

So in conclusion I would rate this bag very high on the value versus money scale, whether you paid a little for it or a moderate amount. High quality, extremely configurable, attractive design. The only downside is that it does encroach on the space where you would have a water bottle in the water bottle holder, unless configured in a non-standard position. For those who don’t need two water bottles, or whose bikes may have a different geometry than mine, losing space for a tall water bottle may not be an issue.

]]>https://randombitsbytes.com/review-roswheel-attack-bike-frame-bag/feed/07419Full Carbon Saddle Testhttps://randombitsbytes.com/full-carbon-saddle-test/
https://randombitsbytes.com/full-carbon-saddle-test/#respondSat, 01 Sep 2018 12:58:19 +0000https://randombitsbytes.com/?p=8557For quite some time now I have wanted to try a full carbon saddle, just for fun. In case you are not familiar with them they are basically a piece of carbon fiber (like bikes are made out of) shaped into a bike saddle. The only other thing these saddles…

]]>For quite some time now I have wanted to try a full carbon saddle, just for fun. In case you are not familiar with them they are basically a piece of carbon fiber (like bikes are made out of) shaped into a bike saddle. The only other thing these saddles will have, for the most part, is the rail of course, though some of the better models may have a little more. Like shocks absorption properties implemented in various ways.

But that aspect was just fine with his saddle. I felt no pressure on my perineal nerve, even when riding on the drop-bars. At the very rear of the saddle it is completely cut-out in the middle but I believe that’s more for cosmetics than usability, as it is too far back to really matter sitting-wise.

Starting from where this cut-out ends to around two-thirds of the way forward is a pretty good channel, though it starts to get shallower toward the forward section. At the very front, at the nose, it flattens to no channel of course, and the nose itself very slightly curves downward.

As to the height of the saddle itself about two-thirds of the way back is the lowest point, very similar to many saddles, with the rear flaring up quite a bit, definitely keeping you from sliding off the back.

This all means that you stay in place quite nicely, even though the surface itself is shiny and smooth feeling and glossy. I had absolutely no trouble staying in place, even though running your hand over the surface might make you concerned for this.

The seat itself is what some may call “carbon look“, with somewhat cross-hatched geometric patterns that move in the sunlight. The rails are painted with whatever glossy ‘carbon look’ pattern the seat surface uses also, and it all blends in together. There are forward and rear limiter markers as well as measurement lines between them.

Unfortunately the one I got had a mismatch in alignment between the left and right side when it came to these markers on the rail. One side was further ahead than the other. I used the one more centered on the right side.

The first thing you will notice when you pick up one of these full carbon saddles is probably that it feels absolutely weightless. According to my scale it is between 3.2 to 3.4 ounces and 91 to 93 grams. It makes any padded seat, even the guaranteed lightest, feel like a brick. Your hand almost wants to pop up in the air, seemingly on its own. You just EXPECT there to be some weight and mass there but there isn’t. Picking it up is like the first time I picked up a carbon steam, or seat post, or handlebars, or even forks.

And you have to say to yourself – I’m going to be putting my weight on this thing? Modern tech and manufacturing is truly amazing.

Mounting it on the bike is conventional, with the seat probably needing to be slightly higher than your conventional saddle. I used a level to begin the seat fit absolutely level, as you normally should, and that seemed to be absolutely perfect with no further adjustments needed.

I did have to nudge my seat up a minuscule amount a few times after the perfunctory ‘bike fit‘ and a couple of times while riding.

For me the narrowness is perfect, and is a great fit for my sit bone width. Maybe more so than my regular seats, which are all quite narrow.

The first sit-down on it was somewhat of a surprise.

Many reviews of full carbon unpadded bike seats rave that they are more comfortable than any padded saddle. After sitting down on this one I started to wonder if they were correct. I wouldn’t say that the first sit-down/”taking a load off” was any more or less comfortable than a lightly padded seat but…

In fact, I really could tell absolutely no difference. For a moment I looked down – did I really put an unpadded seat on and can’t even tell? Yes, that certainly was the case. With a good pair of bike shorts on I felt no difference at all.

Riding was very ‘normal’, I felt no difference in pedaling or comfort except I could definitely feel the road more. The cushioning on a padded seat dampens any road roughness or imperfections, and while it was not a big deal, certainly not a deal breaker, it was noticeable. For some this might be a positive – both for experience as well as usability. For others not so much.

You definitely feel more connected to the varying surfaces of the road, spots of roughness and gravel, and cracks. For me it was in no way uncomfortable nor annoying, but just a different experience and neither better nor worse than a regular saddle. It felt a little like when you put a couple too many pounds in your tires or your tires are very cold or the bike’s been out in the sun and the tire pressure has increased. Some may not even notice any of these things, and perhaps not notice the road surface through the seat either.

As we should all know now – “Everyone’s ass is different”.

Riding on this seat for short rides was indistinguishable from a padded seat. Over medium length rides I started to notice the hardness a bit but re-positioning took care of it. For longer rides it began to get a bit uncomfortable.

I also did a good share of hills and faster riding, as well as city biking. Was there more discomfort during more movement? I couldn’t really tell if there was.

I also rode with various kinds and thicknesses of biking shorts. I prefer a medium-thickness gel short but I tried this saddle with thicker padded shorts and had about the same degrees of results, with minor variations. Higher quality shorts with minimal or medium padding is the best for me in general, and it was no different when using this seat. My fav biking shorts are the Canari ones, great shorts and perfectly padded and durable.

I rode this saddle for a couple hundred miles over a few weeks times – but is that really enough to get used to a seat? Probably not. As a reviewer I probably, ideally, should have given it more time but Summer’s coming to a close and I didn’t want my long distance rides to be ‘getting used to a seat’.’

So perhaps I didn’t give the seat a completely fair shake.

For me the saddle was certainly usable, but certainly no better than a padded one and somewhat worse when riding longer distances.

But from what I have read from the”experts”, as well as from what other cyclists I know have told me, and from other like-minded riders on various forums, and also gleaned from my own personal experience – I believe that the ideal formula on average when it comes to padding is a very moderate amount for both the shorts and saddle. Too little begins to hurt, for obvious reasons; and too much causes excessive movement and instability.

So in conclusion I probably could have given my body longer to adapt to the seat, but it seemed to be more suited to those who may like to ride shorter distances, perhaps at high-speed and sprinting, and need the most minimalistic saddle as possible. Medium distances were pushing it for me some.

But this saddle may also be for those who have issues with discomfort due to too much padding and/or excessive sit-bone movement and chaffing.

]]>https://randombitsbytes.com/full-carbon-saddle-test/feed/08557Review – Generic Rechargeable Bike Lights (sold under various names)https://randombitsbytes.com/review-generic-rechargeable-bike-lights-sold-under-various-names/
https://randombitsbytes.com/review-generic-rechargeable-bike-lights-sold-under-various-names/#respondTue, 24 Jul 2018 13:53:27 +0000http://randombitsbytes.com/?p=8005More and more people are riding with bike lights in the daytime, I personally don’t but it probably is a good idea, considering the statistics and how people seem to have less and less respect for others. I also don’t ride at night but occasionally I do ride during overcast…

Normally I have a small emergency flasher light (also a set found here), permanently attached (and one on my wife’s bike) and tucked up under my seat bag on my seat stem in case of getting stuck out during a pop-up thunderstorm or something (and it has happened – sometimes during a zero percent chance of rain according to the weather forecast, sheesh). This light works well, BTW, with just one LED and the ability to hold a storage charge for a long time via a 2032 watch battery with a second backup battery stored right in the light housing itself. It is good for emergencies but not the brightest, yet it is small and inconspicuous and because it has an actual non-rechargeable battery it can sit on my bike unused for a long period of time and still be ready in an emergency. (Stephen B. sent me the link to these similar lights but which have three LED’s instead of one though these are rechargeable).

But when I know I am going to be out near dusk or in somewhat darker or possibly questionable situations I have other lights available to attach, but I wanted to try something different that was quickly and easily rechargeable, easily attached and detached at a moment’s notice, and so I decided to try a set of generic lights that I have seen advertised and marketed quite a lot in the last year. In fact, I see them all over on various websites.

I’ve used them as needed since last Winter and I am quite impressed with how bright they are and how well they work. I have a pair of the white and a pair of the reds for my bike and my wife’s as well as for running and walking the dogs.

The lights are about 7.5*3*2 cm and as you can see from the pics they are a relatively small thin design, with a curvature on the back that especially fits well when attached to something with a tube-like surface, though they could just as well be strapped to something flat if there were a good attachment point or it wasn’t too wide. The package includes the light, charging cable and two “o” rings, all packaged in little plastic baggies.

Charging

The lights each seem to come charged but I did charge them fully when I got them to make sure. They charge via a regular micro-USB and each comes with a short USB cord. One thing I have found when charging them is that you probably don’t want to plug them into a smart charger as I got a few incomplete charges. A wall plug or just your computer works just fine, or a USB hub of any type. The battery is a non-replaceable 50 mAH Li-Polymer battery and the circuitry stops charging when it is done – when charging it a red light is displayed (different from the regular light itself – and red no matter what color the actual light color is) and this goes off when it is charged. You can also charge it while it is running as a warning light. Charge time is relatively quick, depending on how run down they are. With a good amperage charger maybe a couple of hours at most, usually much shorter.

They are rated IPX-4 rating water-resistant and come with a rubber plug over the charging port. Unfortunately the charging port plug is a bit flimsy and I had one of mine fall off, but it can be carefully slid back in. In general unless you are in a terribly wet rainstorm I doubt it would get enough water inside the USB port when the whole thing is attached anyway, but best to have the waterproof plug in place just in case.

There are four little hooks on the light casing, two on either side, and the light attaches via elastic “o” ring type bands. The packages I got had one large and one small “o” ring. I had a few “o” rings lying around leftover from other hardware, plumbing I suppose, and they worked fine and the “o” rings seem to be exactly like what you would buy into Lowes. You could also use any sort of other type of ring or small strap that would attach around the light’s hooks too, though the “o” rings that came with it are made for diameters of 12-35 mm or so, they are really stretchy and you can combine two together also. I was able to attached a light to a Fitbit Charge 2 band while running as well as the buckle of a reflective sash/belt and the dog’s collars and leashes. And they would fit many other things that you might need a warning light for I would suppose – tractors, lawn tractors, snowblowers, backpacks, slow-moving vehicles, recumbent bikes, bike helmets, trikes, bike racks and carriers, jogging strollers, bike trailers, heck – probably your horse carriage too

White one mounted on fork with larger “o” ring

But of course they are probably bought the most for the purpose of using on bikes – the small band fits most things toward the back of the bike while the large band fits most of the things on the front. They’re attached most anywhere on the frame, seat post, fork, aerobars or bar ends, handlebar, and seat bag (slide the ring vertically down through the strap on the back of the seat bag and slip the hooks of the light over the ring above and below the seat bag strap – see pic below) or any place the attachment ring will fit around..

These are bright! With five bright lights in each one – and they are quite visible from a distance (see the video at the bottom of this page for a quick daytime demonstration). In addition to being bright as seen directly from the front of the lights they are also visible from the left and right and top and bottom. There are multiple flash modes – holding down the tiny power button on the front for a few seconds turns it on and pressing it again rotates through the flash types, the first flash mode which is an up-and-down following sequence with a spreading flash rotation at the end of the sequence before it starts over, the second mode is a strobe, the third another sequence and the fourth a solid light. Holding the button again for a few seconds turns it off. I can usually reach down while biking and turn it on without stopping. The flashing sequences last for hours, three hours at the most for me but the solid light mode seems to last much less – an hour and a half or less. Any of the moving or strobe flashing settings are the way to go as they are definitely attention-getting.

One thing of note is that these are warning lights, and you can’t use the white one with a solid always-on to light your way. Don’t get me wrong; these are super-bright but they are also diffused and their purpose is for warning. For a real headlight you want to go with a real headlight or flashlight sort of light of course.

Outside of the waterproof USB cover coming off on one they seem to be durable and built as well as can be expected, at least over the six or so months that I have had them, with the lens plastic feeling quite thick and the design fairly low-profile and protective yet able to allow the light to be seen well from five directions (directly, from the left and right, and from the top and bottom).

So I have to say that I am quite happy with these lights, and heartily recommend them. I may even give the blue one a try just for fun. Both the white and the red ones I have been testing are tremendously bright and very visible, easily attached and detached to pretty much anything and charge relatively quickly.

]]>https://randombitsbytes.com/review-generic-rechargeable-bike-lights-sold-under-various-names/feed/08005Review – Scosche RHYTHM+ Armband Heart Rate Sensorhttps://randombitsbytes.com/review-scosche-rhythm-armband-heart-rate-sensor/
https://randombitsbytes.com/review-scosche-rhythm-armband-heart-rate-sensor/#commentsMon, 11 Jun 2018 20:31:47 +0000http://randombitsbytes.com/?p=8270This review is for the Scosche RHYTHM+ Armband Heart Rate Sensor and is a six month review of the one I own, and will include some longer-term information on the identical unit that my wife has owned for a couple of years now. I’ve put a lot of time on my ‘classic’…

]]>This review is for the Scosche RHYTHM+ Armband Heart Rate Sensor and is a six month review of the one I own, and will include some longer-term information on the identical unit that my wife has owned for a couple of years now.

I’ve put a lot of time on my ‘classic’ Garmin Heart Rate Strap. I’ve had it for years, having gotten it as part of the package that was included with a Garmin Forerunner watch. It’s been through a few different watches and devices, and many many years of rides, runs, races, rows, and lots of other exercise. And this of course means a heck of a lot of dirt, rain, and of course gallons of sweat.

So when it started occasionally acting wonky it maybe wasn’t so unexpected. It does show the durability of Garmin heart rate straps but despite this it wasn’t such a big deal to switch to another HR monitor sensor device. While I had no complains on the Garmin sensor and it had certainly done it due diligence in providing heart rate data for me covering many years, I didn’t mind trying something new.

The Scosche unit worked great for her, seeming to do it’s job where the chest strap hadn’t. Her Scosche RYHTHM+ went through many miles of running and biking, races and sweat and cold and heat and rain and such.

But after just less than a year she began to experience some drop-outs and we sent it back under warranty. I had contacted the company before-hand to get a return order number and the company was very friendly and helpful. Unfortunately I skimped on getting a tracking number and somehow the unit got lost in the mail.

I resigned myself to buying her a new one but was surprised to find that when I inquired with Scosche they were nice enough to send us a replacement! We both were incredibly happy with Scosche and their people and how helpful they were. How many times do you get customer service like that, and people who actually seem to care? That’s hard to beat.

At one point I bought her a set of replacement bands for the RHYTHM+, which worked great. One thing you notice is the band is very soft and foamy and will absorb sweat and possibly do it’s best to wick the moisture, but it does get very wet after a good run or other intense exercise. And it just as quickly dries out – which is fine usually, until you do two sets of some exercise without a good amount of time in between and then you find that it can still be in the process of drying, so the extra straps sometime come in handy. And they are very easy to Velcro off and on the RHYTHM+ sensor body as needed.

Washing the bands is easy, I take the sensor off the band (of course) and hand wash the band in a little lukewarm water with a bit of dish detergent, then letting the band sit in a mixture of vinegar and baking soda for a while. After a bit washing the band out and rinsing it off, then letting it dry. This does wonders for getting the sweaty smell out as well as dirt and muck from sweat.

So fast forward to last year when I began to experience some intermittent problems with my Garmin chest strap sensor. My wife decided to get me a Scosche RHYTHM+ as a replacement (for Xmas).

It worked perfectly, just as it did for my wife. And I have to say that over the past half year of use I have no complaints about it, outside of maybe a nitpick maybe, which I’ll get to.

The unit itself is small and light, grey low profile boxy plastic, kind of like the size of a large watch but lighter and square with just a button on the front and an LED on the front, and of course the back has the sensors.

One thing I have noticed is that sometimes, if you throw it in your gym bag or whatever, the button can easily be turned on, running your battery down perhaps (though even when my watch says the sensor has low battery power it still seems to run for hours). Supposedly it is supposed to power off when it does not detect a heart rate but this doesn’t seem to be the case from what I have seen. If it gets turned on it is flashing the LED’s and trying to get a heart rate, running down the battery. Simply just make sure it’s in a Tupperware case or box or something where the button won’t accidentally get pushed.

One thing I did notice (as is common) is that there seems to be a very, very slight delay between a heart rate change and the display/recording go it. This can be hard to measure and likely I am expecting instantaneous data display when I should be very happy with how well these sensors and the display and recording of data works. As I have mentioned in other posts I believe that this slight delay is fairly common, and probably even more so with Bluetooth versus ANT+, and it may also have to do with your receiving device and how fast it is. And likely most people reading this are not professionals nor need medical-grade recording so it’s really not an issue, and is barely measurable, but there.

But any delay you notice can be magnified somewhat if you are doing something extra strenuous and movement-intense that involves the arm you have it on, and possibly your whole body – a small amount of spurious stray light may be let in under the edges as your arm moves and allows a slight amount of opening, throwing it off for a very short part of a second. But this is very unusual, and may be more common when doing something like Plyometrics or Boxing or Martial Arts versus running or biking where the arm is not going be be moving as wildly perhaps. And likely this will depend on the person and how tight they have the strap. For boxing or Martial Arts my guess is the bicep or right below the bicep is going to be better than anywhere along the forearm or down near the wrist.

But in general the sensor just works great, it’s probably one of the easiest and problem-free sensor or external devices I have used.

And it syncs quickly on power up and connect to whatever device(s) you use to display and record your heart rate. As well as initial set-up and doing a first sync between devices. A quick hold of the power button on the Scosche turns it on showing an alternating red/blue indicator light, quickly whatever device you have previously synced it to will connect and the sensor will flash three blues to indicate a sync, then a slow blue flash to show normal synced operation.

Initial syncing is easy and quick (just make sure you don’t have people around you who may have the same device) and seems to work on any device I have tried it on. It also works on multiple devices at the same time, including multiple Bluetooth and ANT+ devices at the same time. I haven’t seen any limit myself. Nor have I found any device it does not work with, and unlike some Bluetooth sensors I have there seems to be few or no dropouts on the devices I have synced it to. On new Android versions you may need to have location turned on for it to reliably sync and stay connected – this may depend on the device – and this has to do with how Bluetooth works on Android itself.

The only occasional dropouts I find when using it are when my wife and I are in close proximity on our bike trainers during the Winter – we usually are within a very few feet of each other. Once in a while I get a quick dropout, and immediate re-connection. Usually fast enough that I don’t even notice in real time. Outside, even when we are riding together, I don’t notice this happening. I suspect that the reason it happens inside on the trainer is it is either an issue with our devices being so close to each other or two Bluetooth 4.0 devices being so close and causing ‘confusion’ with the recording device, or possibly it is more related to the location service on my phone cutting out once in awhile from being inside – and stupidly Android requires location to be generally turned on for Bluetooth syncing now (not always but with this device it definitely helps). But it could also have to do with the fact that I am using a phone (Samsung S7 and the Wahoo app) to log and display HR inside, where outside I use my Garmin Forerunner 620 and Garmin Virb.

Placing the armband is easy, the bands are connected to the device via standard Velcro on either side of the sensor and the soft band can be worn on the upper forearm, tricep, bicep, or even lower on the arm. Whether you have muscular or very thin arms or anything in between; you may want to experiment a bit with where you place it – for comfort as well as ability to stay in place without cinching it too tight. The soft band seems to stay in place quite nicely for the most part, no matter where I put mine. Another nice thing about being able to put it anywhere up your arm is that if you wanted to you could ‘hide’ it under a short sleeve if you do put it up high enough. You should actually be able to attach it to your ankle perhaps, but would the accuracy decrease? I’m not sure as this isn’t something I have personally tested.

One of my friends mentioned that some people may have more accuracy with one arm over the other, I don’t have any anecdotal evidence of this but it might be worth a try for those who get low or intermittent readings.

One thing you that may want to consider with the armband is that it may leave an untanned band on your arm if you wear it outside during sunny seasons Versus the chest strap where it is under your shirt (unless you go shirtless of course). So I vary the placement of my Scosche Rhythm to avoid tan lines – not only for cosmetic reasons but because I don’t want to have a band of untanned skin that may burn when I am not using the sensor, as well as look funny. Wear sunscreen too of course! And you can always switch arms too.

The sensor itself uses three LED’s; two green and one yellow (I believe the idea here is that the yellow allows it to work across darker skin tones versus comparable units that only use green) to read the heart rate by illuminating your capillaries with the LED’s, and reading this light as it reflects off your blood flow via sensors, using a principle of measuring the light scattered by blood flow.

Is it as accurate as a chest strap? From my (informal) tests it does seem to be (with the above caveat when doing extreme exercises of some types). And I mean pretty much 99%, which is kind of hard to believe, but when checking it against a manual taking of my pulse at the same time as a display of my pulse on a device it is amazingly accurate. Is it accurate enough for medical use? Everyone will tell you that it and devices like it are not medical-quality. And while that may be the case it does seem to be very accurate when at rest according to my own informal and occasional tests. I also tested it against a manual heart rate test after immediately stopping in the middle of an activity.

This of course is not checking the accuracy in the middle of an intense exercise while in actual progress, without stopping. But I did do a few quick non-manual tests by temporarily linking my old Garmin chest strap to a phone app and checking it against the Scosche while it was connected to my Forerunner. At the time the Garmin heart rate strap seemed to be functioning just fine and the heart rate measurements were in accord. This was not a long-term test but was good for a quick spot check for when I first got the Scosche.

My guess is that for biking and running under normal circumstances it is going to be as correct as the average person needs it to be, with momentary inaccuracies or delays if going over rough ground or a rough road perhaps but nothing that will affect the overall accuracy.

Devices like the Fitbit series are meant to be worn a bit looser, and with higher level exercise these begin to lose accuracy quite quickly unless they too are cinched up tight to the wrist. But the Scosche is meant to be somewhat tight to the skin and thus does not allow any errant light in under normal circumstances.

One possible controversy with armband versus chest strap measurement is the idea that your blood may have slowed a bit by the time it reaches your arm, and this may come into play proportionally higher at high heart rates, thus increasing the error rate. Is anyone reading this review a pro athlete? Probably not, and likely the small difference (if there is a measurable one with this device) is moot.

The RHYTHM+ has a long battery life, around eight hours according to Scosche and with my own tests this seems about right, give or take.

The Bluetooth is the newer version which is supposedly good for a hundred feet. In reality this is much less but better than the old Bluetooth formats, certainly.

A one year warranty and money back warranty too.

You get a small band and a large band which will cover most anyone, and the charger for it, which can be plugged into a USB port on a computer, hub, or wall USB transformer, etc. The sensor, with or without the strap on it, can be snapped into this quickly and easily and securely and snapped out just as easily. It charges fairly quickly.

I recommend keeping a little rag or absorbent cloth near your charger or where you take the unit off your arm and giving the sensor a little wipe down after use, to keep the ‘muck’ off the charging ports, LED’s and sensors.

A bit of advice for using the the Scosche Armband HR sensor with long-sleeved shirts in cooler times of the year – and which has nothing to do with the design of the device but is just the nature of how it attaches – sometimes you may need to cinch or secure it a bit tighter for when you pull on or off long sleeve shirts. It may get pulled or slid up with your sleeve if you tend to wear the RHYTHM+ a bit looser, or you have thin arms, as possibly with tighter long-sleeve shirts it can detach the Velcro so you don’t want to have it get lost or stuck in your shirt when you wash it, as well as not be recording your HR data. Strangely enough I have had this happen as well as my wife and in the darkness of the long-sleeves it still recorded what looked like accurate data.

A nitpick or issue that I do have is that unfortunately there is only an app for iPhones/iPads for updating the firmware, nothing for updating the firmware on any other device. For those who don’t have an iPhone or iPad they must either send the RHYTHM+ back to the company for a firmware update (or even a check to see if there is a firmware update) or find a friend with an iPhone who will install the Scosche app and see if there is a firmware update, and update it. A few people have reported some issues with the update and app, perhaps it might be best to send it back to Scosche? I want to mention though – the preceding is only in reference to updating the firmware – any Android device will work fine with the Scosche RHYTHM+ for syncing and normal tracking of heart rate.

As I mentioned earlier my wife had one go bad but recently she had a little trouble with her’s not charging. But cleaning the charging contacts on both the sensor and the charger did the job. Usually a little alcohol on a cotton swab works just fine but in her case one contact had some thick muck so I used a miniature wire brush from a Dremel kit, spinning it a little across the contacts by hand (not attached to the Dremel) when nothing else helped.

If you are looking for a replacement, or an alternative to the standard chest strap heart rate sensor, then check out the Scosche RHYTHM+ Armband Heart Rate Sensor. I don’t think you will not be disappointed in how well it works, the sensor data from it, nor how durable it is for your exercise and fitness activities.

]]>https://randombitsbytes.com/review-scosche-rhythm-armband-heart-rate-sensor/feed/18270Migrating Wikispaces Content to WordPresshttps://randombitsbytes.com/migrating-wikispaces-content-to-wordpress/
https://randombitsbytes.com/migrating-wikispaces-content-to-wordpress/#commentsTue, 20 Mar 2018 17:14:36 +0000http://randombitsbytes.com/?p=8370Wikispaces Is Closing Please note – as Wikispaces shuts down some of this blog entry will be invalid. I also have went with a migration to Dokuwiki instead of WordPress so the demo links no longer work for the WordPress migration. Unfortunately the site Wikispaces.com is shutting down, leaving…

Please note – as Wikispaces shuts down some of this blog entry will be invalid. I also have went with a migration to Dokuwiki instead of WordPress so the demo links no longer work for the WordPress migration.

Unfortunately the site Wikispaces.com is shutting down, leaving a lot of us who have wiki’s there high and dry. What did we expect, I suppose – it was free. And now a lot of us need to find new homes for our wiki’s.

The problem is Wikispaces’ wiki format is somewhat proprietary so it’s not just a matter of exporting or migrating the site elsewhere, it’s just not that easy. They do offer exports/backups of our sites in the form of static files like PDF’s and plain HTML files as well as what seems like various formats corresponding to different wiki formats. Yet these latter file types are usually not 100% compatible with the formats they are exporting to, plus with the trouble of using command line sequences and figuring out exactly how to do that it is going to be prohibitive to most users.

So a lot of us, including a lot of those in education who were using Wikispaces, were out of luck.

Addendum 4/20/18 – A few more companies have come forward with Wikispace migration tools for their services; some of which may or may not work that well. One that seems to be relatively economical and has been getting good reviews is Mywikis.com, they look very promising.

Addendum and side note – 5/29/18 – I love WordPress, but a few people mentioned that it wasn’t very wiki-like in the editing department and I set about doing a conversion to Dokuwiki as another test. This was complex to convert but once I got it done it worked quite well and very nicely – so for interested I can also set up your Wikispaces wiki on on Dokuwiki too. Here is our JeffCoWiki demo running on Dokuwiki. Now, back to the posting…

A friend (Art) and I took over a historical wiki covering our local area, mostly historical but also a general ‘everything about Jefferson County’ wiki. Occasionally a few people would register and make some edits, which was good, but I think for the most part Art and I entered the vast majority of data into the wiki, and I think Art by far added the most. It has grown to 880+ pages.

When we found out that Wikispaces was shutting down in the near future we decided to start looking at alternatives. We both did a lot of research and I did a lot of installing of various wiki’s in an attempt to try to import our wiki into them, with no success. In a few cases a person more well-versed in a particular wiki format and command line options for its obscure import software may have been able to do the job but I was not.

I was able to set up a static test site by unzipping the HTML exports from Wikispaces and simply dumping the contents into a directory on a server. It worked fine, but it is totally static and we definitely wanted to allow trusted contributors to add content. So it was good for archival/temporary purposes but no good for long-term use.

We resigned ourselves to the fact that we might have to copy and paste every single page into another page on another site. Not something we wanted to do, nor either of us had time to do – especially since links and such would have to be changed on every single reference, photos uploaded, etc.

I don’t like to refer to myself as ‘expert’ in anything, but I am very knowledgeable in WordPress. I love WordPress, and about 30% of the Internet uses it for websites now. I use it for all of my websites and you’re reading this blog on WordPress right now.

So I wondered if there was a way to import the large number of static HTML files from the Wikispaces export into WordPress.

Sure, I could create a Page or Post in WordPress, click the “Text” tab in the editor, paste a file into it, save it, and then go to the next one but, just like the idea of copying and pasting into another site; it was going to take a long, long time and there would have to be a of editing.

I started looking around and I found a plugin that imports any number of HTML files from a directory on the same server as the WordPress Installation.

I’m a geek so my heart fluttered a little, I have to admit. This was the answer to our problem, just maybe.

It turned out to be; I believe, though we are still testing it. And unfortunately it wasn’t just a simple matter of clicking a few buttons. It was much more involved and was a fair amount of mucking about and experimentation to get things to work right.

But once I did get it right it was beautiful – a fully functional, fully trusted-visitor-editable wiki in WordPress. And frankly it looks and works better than it did on Wikispaces, not to mention that in the future we can take advantage of all the functions of WordPress.

I decided to look around and found that others were looking for solutions too, like on the Wikispaces-Refuges group. While the Civihosting tool is the answer for some it may not be for everyone so I thought that I would share the fact that I had come up with an alternative, albeit it’s not anywhere as easy nor quick as the Civihosting one.

I decided to share the instructions here as I believe that information should be free. But I also know that a fair number of people are not going to have the basic knowledge nor time nor interest in doing this.

A few notes here – I use”directories” here to mean both file storage structures on your own computer’s hard drive as well as the hard drive or SSD of a server, some people may call them “folders” or “sub-directories” – all the same. Secondly I use the capitalized ‘Pages’ and ‘Posts’ to mean WordPress structures, and lowercase ‘pages’ as a general term for website pages, pages from a Wikispaces site, pages exported from Wikispaces, etc.

*Firstly you need hosting and WordPress installed somewhere. Most good hosting services have a one-click or easy installation of WordPress. You don’t want to try this on WordPress’ free hosted platform – whether it would work with their paid plans I don’t know.

I would recommend a brand new blank WordPress installation as I think there is going to be some trial and error and resetting to get things to work right. Theoretically you should be able to do this in an existing WordPress install with other content already in place, but if you import hundreds of files and need to start over again it is going to be harder to do if you already have content there.

For those who don’t want to invest in hosting yet, you COULD use a free hosting site for testing – like http://byethost.com or http://freehostia.com or whatever. As long as they work fine while you are testing. I just tested this on Byethost.com and it worked fine, but they are a little flaky; as many free hosting companies are. Good for testing perhaps.

*Secondly you need an HTML export from Wikispaces. If you don’t know how to do this keep reading.

*Thirdly you need an FTP program (Filezilla is excellent and free – https://filezilla-project.org/download.php), or you may be able to use your hosting panel’s built-in File Manager. Some File Managers let you upload multiple files easily – that’s what you need to be able to do, if your host’s file manager doesn’t let you do this you’ll need to use an FTP program. If using and FTP program you need your login credentials for the FTP account.

*Fourthly you are probably going to need a text editor that will load multiple files and be able to search and replace across those multiple files – all without having to go to each individual file to do a search and replace. If you have a smaller site with few pages you can probably just do the files individually. We had 880+ pages so it was integral to be able to do a mass search and replace across ALL files at once. Notepad++ works fine and is free. Familiarize yourself with it a bit after installing it (or whatever you are going to use to edit multiple files).

*Fifthly – you probably should have some basic knowledge of WordPress and using it, as well as a basic understanding of file structures and URL’s and uploading and unzipping and maybe a little knowledge of HTML… You don’t have to be an expert in any of these but you need to understand the basics.

The first thing you want to do is export a zipped HTML file of your entire wiki. Go to your wiki, click Settings and then “Export/Backups” and it should default to HTML, if not select it under Content Type. Leave the file type as ZIP and then click Export. Download the file (it may take a bit if you have a lot of stuff to export) and open it – it will either open in a Windows’ explorer-type of window or it will open in whatever archiver program you have associated with ZIPs. 7-Zip is a good free unzipper.

Create a directory on your hard drive to hold these files and copy or extract everything in the zip to this directory, including subdirectories included in the ZIP (make sure your archival program will duplicate the directory structure so that everything isn’t jumbled together).

When it is finished if you take a look at the directory that you extracted the ZIP to you will see that your entire wiki is there – the wiki pages are in HTML, your photos and docs are in a FILES subdirectory, your entire master style sheet is in the STATIC subdirectory, and all of your discussions are in the DISCUSSION directory (in JSON format – more about this later).

Now either connect to your hosting using an FTP program or go into your hosting control panel and access the File Manager there. Create a directory on your hosting space in the same root as your WordPress installation, but not inside your WordPress Directory (unless you installed WordPress directly to your root directory on the server, though really it’s okay where you ever you put it as long as it is on the same server). In other words the directory you create will show up in the same directory that contains the WordPress directory. This isn’t a big deal as long as you know where the directory is, as you’ll eventually want to delete it.

So it might look like:

wordpress html

If you installed WordPress directly to your root directory the HTML directory can be mixed in with WordPress’ directory and files. As I said – no big deal as long as you know where it is and delete it afterward.

Enter the directory you created and upload everything from the directory on your harddrive containing everything from the previously unzipped file wiki HTML file. Upload everything including the FILES directory as it will import all of your photos and such too.

Once that is finished uploading close your FTP program for the time being log into your WordPress Dashboard, click ADD NEW under PLUGINS. In the search box enter ‘HTML Import 2‘ (created by Stephanie Leary) and scroll the screen down until you find the plugin, install and activate it.

Using WordPress for your wiki works just fine, but to make it work even better and more like a ‘regular’ wiki also install Yada Wikiplugin (by David McCan). This plugin allows you to link wiki pages together with the titles of the wiki pages.

I would recommend also installing the “Reset WP” plugin (by Nikunj Soni) so you can experiment with a fresh database and settings each time until you get things right, as you are probably going to be changing some settings here and there and wiping everything if things aren’t correct.

Once those plugins are installed and activated go to Settings in your WordPress Dashboard, select “Permalinks” and select “Post name” then go down and click “Save Changes“.

Now you are ready to go into the import plugin. Go back to Settings and click “HTML Import“.

At this point I would recommend using a note pad (either on your computer, phone, tablet, or on real life paper) so that you can keep track of the settings you use and the results.

On the first tab at the top at the HTML Import screen you will need to enter the absolute path to the subdirectory where you uploaded your HTML files and such. There is a hint and part of it should be filled in, you’ll need to take out some of what is filled in and refer to the hint to figure out your absolute path. The path should consist of the hint after you replace the ending part, where your WordPress directory is installed, with where your HTML files are stored.

If the hint shows /home2/server/public_html/wp and the directory where you installed your HTML files is called ‘html‘ then the absolute would be /home2/server/public_html/html

Under “Old site URL” enter the complete URL of where your HTML files are stored, not really important as you won’t be using this for redirects anyway.

Beside “Default file” you can file in home.html here.

For ‘Preserve file names‘ I left this off, thought I experimented with it a bit.

Click “Save Settings“.

Click the next tab at the top called “Content“, I selected “Import entire file” here but I don’t think it matters.

Beside “More content options” I selected “Import linked images” (this will import all of your images and put them into your imported pages and everything – there won’t be any need to mess with importing them separately) and “import linked documents” (if you have anything beside graphics).

Next select “Update internal links” (this latter didn’t seem to do anything but if it works for you it will save a lot of extra work).

If you want the name of your wiki preceding the name on each Page or Post (or Yada Wiki page) in your browser’s title bar than you can skip “Phrase to remove from page title:” but I would recommend opening any one of the HTML files from your wiki into a text editor, and look at what is in the <TITLE> tag. Your wiki’s name will probably be in every single HTML file – if you don’t want them displayed with the title of each Page or Post (or Yada Wiki page) enter the name, a space, the dash, and another space into “Phrase to remove from page title:“. On our wiki the title looked like this:

<title>JeffCoWiki – Jefferson County Pioneers</title>

So I entered “JeffCoWiki – ” into the “Phrase to remove from page title:”

Alternately you could remove this from each file using the mass search and replace methods shown below, using a text editor.

You can try it on a few imported pages and see how it looks but I would recommend removing the title, as it’s annoying.

For the ‘Import files as” I highly recommend selecting Yada Wiki pages (Wiki Pages – if you did not install the Yada Wiki plugin this will not be a choice). For the rest of the options on this page you should be able to leave them as-is unless you want to use a specific template for the Pages/Posts/Wiki Pages that are created.

Before trying the Yada Wiki plugin I experimented with converting the HTML imports into Pages as well as Posts. If you are not using the Yada Wiki then you probably want to go with because A) you can display and edit tags, categories, edit dates, etc – otherwise if using Pages B) when you add editors/contributors their WordPress dashboard bar along the top of the screen will default to creating new Posts when clicking New.

Click “Save Settings“.

Make sure you have a notepad and write down your settings and results, as I mentioned above.

Near the top of the screen you should see a message that says ‘Settings saved. Ready to import files?“.

On the next screen make sure where it says “Your files will be imported from” has the correct URL – though right now we aren’t going to use this but you might want to check on it anyway. This is where your HTML files were uploaded to on your server, just to remind you.

Now I would suggest importing one or two files and see how things look, and what you want to try and do here is to find a couple of files that would have links to each other so that you can check internal linking. You may want to refer to your original Wikispaces site or look through a few of the HTML files on your hard drive, etc to find a few pages that have links to each other or some type. Depending on your wiki and how you had things organized there may or may not be many of these, I suppose.

To import a couple of files for testing this select “a single file” and then click “Choose File“, which will bring up a regular dialog box where you can select a file on your hard drive from the directory where you originally unzipped the HTML files. This only lets you choose one file at a time so you have to go back to HTML Import and click Save Settings (without changing anything, or add “?import=html” to your admin URL) to get the “Ready to import files?” link at the top again.

You may want to do this a few times to get a couple of files to play around with.

Now go to one of the Pages or Posts or Wiki Pages (if you installed the Yada Wiki plugin) that you imported (view them via the link shown after you import or by going up to “Pages” or “Posts” or “Wiki Pages” in your WordPress Dashboard and clicking “View” under one) that you know has links to another Page or Post or Yada Wiki Page that you uploaded. Click one of the links that should take you to another uploaded Page or Post or Wiki Page. If your wiki HTML files are like mine (where the original Wikispaces page titles/link have spaces in them) you’ll notice that these links try to take you to a Page or Post with spaces in the filename.

As far as I can tell the plugin is supposed to fix whatever links are in each imported Page/Post/Yada Wiki Page to show the correct link of other files imported, in this case Page/Post/Yada Wiki Page names with spaces should be replaced with dashes. It does not on the test installations that I tried.

WordPress does not work with spaces in its Post/Pages/Yada Wiki Page titles/url’s so it will replace them with dashes internally.

I have seen a few Wikispaces sites that seemed to have +’s or no spaces in the filenames, in those cases you may be able to skip much of the below instructions as pertaining to replacement of spaces.

So now we are getting to the tricky part and this will probably take some trial and error and experimentation, so be patient. If you didn’t have a lot of pages to import you COULD skip this whole search and replace section and import your files en mass at this point and edit each Page or Post or Yada Wiki Page manually.

Also see the comment posted in the Comment section below by Tom Holden on a better search and replace procedure which should eliminate external links from being found and changed, if needed.

I will explain how to replace the spaces in the internal filename references in a bit but I also noticed that once I corrected the spaces and converted them to dashes, the URL’s wanted to load into my server’s root directory, which was wrong for my installation. You may not run into this problem if you installed your WordPress in your server’s root, but if you installed it in its own directory then you may have to fix not only the spaces in the filenames but also prepend the full address for before the internal links. If you are not sure you can do it anyway as it won’t hurt anything.

It’s a lot easier than it sounds, to do this.

At this point you will need to break out the multi-file editor. See the beginning of this post for info on what you need.

In your multi-file editor load all the HTML files from the directory on your hard drive where you had unzipped them (but not anything from the sub-directories at this point). You can usually use the editor’s Open Dialog box or select all the files in the directory using a file manager window (CONTROL-A or COMMAND-A on a Mac) and drag them into the editor.

If you have a LOT of files this may take a few minutes to load, be patient.

In the HTML files you will find the internal links to other pages look like this –

So what we need to do is take the ASCII code ‘%20‘ (which means a space) and convert that into dashes so that all internal links will be correct to conform with how WordPress saves internal links.

Find your editor’s Replace option, in Notepad++ it is under the Search menu. Enter %20 in the Find field, and a dash (-) in the Replace or ‘Replace with‘ field (depending on what editor you are using). In Notepad++ click “Replace All in All Opened Documents“, if you are using some other editor you will have to find the option to apply this to all opened files.

The replacement process should be fairly quick, once it is finished check a few files to make sure everything is correct.

It may be worth it at this point to do a simple search in your text editor for things like other ASCII URL encoding characters in the form of ‘%26‘ (which would be the ampersand character for example) that references an internal link. Either change them manually in each file or do another mass search and replace if you find it happening a lot in the HTML files; replacing them with their actual character equivalents. In other words use %26as the Find, and & as the Replace. Look for common things like %28 (left parenthesis), %29 (right parenthesis), etc and replace them with the actual characters as above. Here is a good reference. You may or may not have any of these characters as part of your Wikispaces page titles, depending on how you and your contributors named things so don’t be surprised if you find none of these characters in the internal references to other pages in your wiki.

Now to change the overall location to be correct.

Again, if your wiki files do not have spaces in the filenames you can skip the above, but you may still need to adjust the overall URL’s for internal links.

Now you want to insert the WordPress installation’s full address before each internal link. Only the internal links of course, we don’t want to accidentally change any external links if you have references to outside websites, if we can help it. To do this:

Go back into Replace and enter “<a class=”wiki_link” href=” (without the outside quotes) into the Find What field and in the Replace with: field enter “<a class=”wiki_link” href=” followed by your WordPress’ full address with a trailing slash, like this –

<a class=”wiki_link” href=”http://somesite.com/

or this –

<a class=”wiki_link” href=”http://somesite.com/wordpress/

Check this replace box over to make sure everything is correct and then click “Replace All in All Opened Documents” or equivalent.

Once it has finished heck a couple of the files to make sure everything looks right.

Remember – if you totally screwed something up you can always extract the original ZIPPED HTML files again, and refer to your notes.

Go back to your WordPress installation, go to Settings and click “HTML Import” then click “Save settings” at the bottom and look for the ‘ready to import files?” link at the top. Again, upload and try a few files here that are linked to each other (possibly you want to delete any previously uploaded test pages). If everything has been edited correctly any internal links should work just fine.

If all is not well check your Permalinks setting in WordPress, and go to the Page or Posts or Yada Wiki Page editor in WordPress and take a look at your internal inks to see what is happening.

If all did go well either go into the Page or Post or Yada Wiki Page editor in WordPress and delete the Pages/Posts/Yada Wiki Page that you had uploaded, or use the ‘Reset WP‘ plugin to reset everything (you’ll need to log back in and re-enter all of the settings you wrote down in the earlier step, back into the HTML Import plugin).

Now that you know things have been edited correctly on your computer and the individual files uploaded look fine – you will need to re-upload all of your HTML files into the directory you created previously, overwriting what you had originally uploaded. In fact you may not have really needed to uploaded them originally. But at this step when everything was looking fine I liked trying a few dry runs by uploading everything a few times and them making some changes here and there, resetting, and re-uploading them. But you don’t have to do this if you do not wish, but if you didn’t before now is the time to.

In HTML Import (again, click Save settings to get the link to come up along the top or add “?import=html” to your admin URL) you can now leave ‘a directory of files‘ selected and click Submit.

After awhile (depending on how many files you have) it will finish, giving you some status updates for any problems found.

Take a spot check view of some of the Pages or Posts or Yada Wiki Page that you imported, and make sure the internal links are working correctly. If they are not you may have to use the Reset WP a few more times to play around with changes and make any replacements or corrections in your text editor, re-entering your HTML Import settings from your notes as needed. It may take a few times to get everything working right if you are not very familiar with some of the process of using WordPress, editing HTML, etc. Look for any more internal links that add ASCII characters to file names and change them to their non-ASCII equivalents (as shown above, if you find that you have a lot you might find it easier to do another mass search and replace and reset everything again and re-upload/re-import).

Once things are working well you can disable and delete the HTML Import plugin and Reset WP plugin. If you are sure all is well you can also delete the HTML directory off your server (you still have your edited files on your computer of course).

All of your internal images should be embedded in their proper places, all internal links should work, and rudimentary formatting should be in place (paragraphs, image sizes, etc).

Now you’ll want to cleanup any problems you can think of or run into. One may be external links that had a space in their website/webpage names. The search and replace process we used earlier will have replaced those with dashes, so you’ll want to use WordPress’ Page or Post or Yada Wiki Page editor to fix anything like that. Anywhere images or documents referenced externally should be checked for broken links, certain things like JavaScript and various embedded functions from external websites may need some help – sometimes in the form of switching back and forth between WordPress’ “Visual” and “Text” editor tabs.

If you imported everything in Posts or Yada Wiki Pages instead of regular WordPress Pages you might want to change some master Post-type items to Pages instead – like the Home Page (home). Personal preference here whether you do or not. You can use the plugin Post Type Switcher to do this (or comparable plugin) , otherwise the only way to convert a Post to a Page or Yada Wiki Page (or vice versa) is to copy its content from its current type to a new one of the type that you want it to become. If you change post types in WordPress you do not have to change any links as it does not distinguish between Post types and Page types or Yada Wiki Pages in the internal links to them. Just make sure that you do not have both a Page and Post or Yada Wiki Pages with the same name.

Once that is finished (which may be quick, or may not be!) you will want to check your index/home page for the site. In the previous steps in the HTML Import plugin we set ‘home.html‘ as your home page.

Likely this is going to be missing some things, like the menu that was displayed in Wikispaces along the sidebar.

Create a new menu in WordPress corresponding to the menu you had on Wikispaces – either referring to your original Wikispaces’ site or loading the file ‘space.menu.html‘ into your browser to view what it looked like. Most WordPress themes allow a sidebar so once you create your menu and save it, you can go into the WordPress Widgets and insert a menu into the sidebar, or assign your menu to your theme’s main navigation area which is probably going to be a more modern horizontal menu.

I did a little of both – I created two menu’s; one for the sidebar and one for the top horizontal position with different menu purposes/items in mind.

I also created yet another menu with links to user registration, login, log-out, profiles, etc. that would appear in the sidebar for editors. In the WordPress settings I made sure that no one could post anonymously, and that all registrations have to be approved by an admin – to keep spammers out.

Other widgets to perhaps add to your sidebar – Search (though you may have this option in your top menu and not want to duplicate it), social media links, top pages and comments, and things along those lines. Take advantage of the things you can do with WordPress that you couldn’t with Wikispaces!

Check out your theme’s settings in Customize under Appearance in WordPress. In your original UNZIPPED directory you will find a sub-directory called “static” which has your Wikispaces’ style sheet. You can refer to this as well as your original Wikispaces site for colors and styles for your WordPress theme. How you do this may depend on the theme but usually you will find this under WordPress’ Appearance and then Customize.

I also recommend installing plugins like Jetpack, a security plugin like Wordfence, bbPress for a discussion forum (there are many plugins that go with this to enhance it also, and you might want to put a little work into integrating it into your wiki), a related posts plugin like Contextual Related Posts, a user editor like User Role Editor (this will give you better control of what your users and contributors can and can not do), if needed Post Tags and Categories for Pages so that you can have categories and tags for Pages just like for posts – if you imported everything into Pages instead of Posts (though these will not display publicly on Page type without a little code hack), and a backup plugin of some sort (there are many but I like Updraft and BackWPup), and perhaps a revision display/control plugin (still looking at various ones for this).

You can also easily switch and test themes – there are thousands, though I recommend Cryout Creations themes – they are extraordinary.

After playing around a bit with the home page, additions, menus and themes and all the rest you should have at least a working, usable wiki at this point. WordPress is awesome, but you can spend hours customizing and adding to it.

If you installed the Yada Wikiplugin (by David McCan) you will have some additional nice Wiki-style options in the WordPress editor bar (while in the Yada Wiki page editor) as well as expanded functions that make your new wiki act more like Wikispaces (and other wiki’s) do. You might want to check out the video tutoial on using it.

One of the things that it does is it gives you and your editors/contributors the ability to quickly select other internal links via a button in each Wiki Page, very similar to how Wikispaces was set up (versus having to fill out the entire link when using the usual WordPress Insert/Edit Link button).

Clicking the Add Wiki Link button brings up a link window, which allows you to start filling in the link name. If there is a page with that name it auto-completes it and you can just click “Insert Shortcode” (or add a more description name in the box below called “Show:”). If the page has not been created as yet a link is created that will only show to a user who is logged in and has permission to edit pages, to all others it just shows the text name with no link (as there is no page there yet).

For those who are logged in and have their permissions set to edit the Wiki Pages the link is clickable and takes them to the Wiki Page creation screen, again similar to Wikispaces.

The Yada Wiki plugin also gives you the ability to add a Table of Contents and shortcodes to insert it into other Pages/Posts/Yada Wiki Pages, a sidebar widget, and more.

There are a few options, like the option to turn on or off the ability to quickly link to Wiki Page links both in Posts and Pages as well as Wiki Pages. Read the instructions if you need more info. i highly recommend using this plugin for your wiki.

If you relied on tags while using Wikispaces there does not seem to be any way to export these from Wikispaces. You will probably need to enter these manually for each Page or Post or Yada Wiki Page, referring to your Wikispaces site as you do so perhaps. Or just not worry about them for now and allow WordPress’ own search to find subjects you and your visitors are looking for.

Your member list is not exported either so you probably want to contact each of your members on Wikispaces who have edited and participated in contributing to your Wikispaces’ wiki and get them to register on your new WordPress site, which is easy. You may want to provide links via the main WordPress menu, a secondary menu, sidebar links, or something like that to make it easier for people to find out how register, log in, and update their profiles.

Comments and discussions are exported in JSON format, and saved in the ‘discussion’ directory in the ZIPPED HTML export from Wikispaces. There’s plenty of converters, or you can use a mult-file editor to convert it into HTML or strip out any codes and paste them in directly. Or use a JSON converter like http://json2table.com/ or perhaps this better one – http://json2html.varunmalhotra.xyz found by Tom H.

We did not have very many discussions, and a few could be discarded anyway, so I added them to an ‘Archived Discussions’ Page.

As time goes on I may tweak this blog post (or in some cases correct it), and add to it. While I have tested all of the above a few times with additional test installations of WordPress as well as a couple of other’s exports I can not guarantee that you may not run into other issues, or heck – maybe it just won’t work for you at all.

And for a little bit of self-promotion here – as I mentioned earlier in this post I am available to convert and set up a similar WordPress copy of your wikispaces wiki for you, or a Dokuwiki conversion (see my addendum note near the beginning of this post and here is our JeffCoWiki demo running on Dokuwiki), just contact me.

]]>https://randombitsbytes.com/migrating-wikispaces-content-to-wordpress/feed/128370Review – Ascent Fluid Bike Trainer / Travel Trac Comp Fluid Bicycle Trainerhttps://randombitsbytes.com/review-ascent-fluid-bike-trainer-travel-trac-comp-fluid-bicycle-trainer/
https://randombitsbytes.com/review-ascent-fluid-bike-trainer-travel-trac-comp-fluid-bicycle-trainer/#respondFri, 02 Mar 2018 20:20:38 +0000http://randombitsbytes.com/?p=8267note here before I start the review – as you can see I have both the Ascent Bike Trainer and Travel Trac Fluid Bike Trainer listed. This is because they are the same unit, rebranded. There is no difference except the logo and printing on them and unfortunately at the…

]]> A note here before I start the review – as you can see I have both the Ascent Bike Trainer and Travel Trac Fluid Bike Trainer listed. This is because they are the same unit, rebranded. There is no difference except the logo and printing on them and unfortunately at the time of posting this blog review the Ascent version (which is what I have) is not available on Amazon while the Travel Trac one is. You can get the Ascent other places of course.

So on to the review.

For such a relatively low price this trainer seems to be made amazingly well and is obviously pretty heavy-duty. It’s constructed with thick beefy tubes and heavy plastic feet and a good-sized fluid-filled cylinder – the whole thing weighs in at an even twenty-four pounds according to my digital scale. You can tell right out of the box, compared to some of the other cheaper bike trainers, that it’s of a higher quality.

And here’s one of the amazing things about it this trainer – you can open up the box it was sold in or it was shipped in, unfold it, and put your bike right on it and ride.

That’s right, there’s no assembly whatsoever. The frame folds out and the roller- and fluid-filled cylinder swings outward, so all you need to do is just attach your bike and tighten down the hub mount.

There is a double-sided instruction sheet and this mostly covers use of the trainer, the sheet quickly covers the basics as there’s not really a lot that you need to know.

The trainer does come with a skewer for your rear hub, which fits the ‘cups’ of the trainer’s hub attachments exactly and probably is what you should use when securing your bike to it. It’s easy to swap out your skewer – just remove your old skewer and slide this one in – when you plan on riding outside again just swap your old one back in, or leave this one in if you wish.

While you probably should install the skewer that it comes with the trainer you might not need to. I gave a quick try with my stock skewer and the cups that fit over the hub ends fit it fine.

But for security sake and to prevent any movement and such I use the skewer that came with the trainer. There’s barely any movement when you put the bike on and you don’t even need to tighten it very much. Of course you want to snug the tightener knob a reasonable amount to be sure, and then spin the locking knob down so that everything is sure to stay in place. For carbon bikes, especially, the ability for it to lock well into place without a lot of tightening against the frame is pretty important and noteworthy.

Unlike some other trainers there is only one side that tightens down, which makes putting the bike on and taking it off the trainer quick and easy. My guess is that it makes it less likely for you to accidentally tighten it too much. Again, a concern especially for those with carbon bikes.

Big knob and locking ring for hub

The tightener knob is big and easy to turn and the locking ring/knob is a quick and easy spin to lock it in place, though I doubt the big knob would move or turn very much even if you forget to cinch the locking part.

If you have come from a different trainer that has a tightener knob of some sort on both sides it may take a few times to get used to having just one side tighten down, as you need to fully back the tightener out to fit the rear of the bike in, at least with my particular bike. But you’ll find that it quickly becomes a faster way to put the bike on when you don’t have two sides to tighten down and even out.

As I said above the construction is heavy-duty, it is not real light but of a reasonable heft without being too heavy.

The base has plastic feet at the corners, which rotate through a short degree of motion to be adjustable for the surface that the trainer is on, whether the trainer is folded out for use or folded up for storage. There’s no leveling adjustment for the feet though, but I suppose if you have a very uneven surface you could turn one of two feet up and away somewhat.

The fluid cylinder and roller part hinge inward so that when the whole thing is folded up it presents a very thin profile, as you can see in the photos. You can just fold it all out again in moments quickly and easily, there are no latches or snaps of any sort, when folded out the weight of the unit and bike hold the legs out and when folded up friction in the hinge bolts holds the unit folded pretty well. Though if you were moving it often or any distance or just worried about it folding out on you while carrying it you could bungee the legs together on one side or the other.

Folded up, it takes up very little space.

Just like the tightener for the hub there is a big gnarled knob to tighten the tension of the roller against your wheel with a locking ring there also. Again, it’s a quick job to tighten it down as you want and then spin the locking ring down to make sure everything’s held in place. The tightener bolt itself is of a good size just like the tensioner for the hub, and should offer many years of service, with a rubber foot on the end that touches the metal of the trainer.

The cylinder containing the fluid looks to be a cast aluminum container with small heat sinks all the way around it. You definitely don’t want to touch this after you’ve ridden for a while, as it will get quite warm. The roller too and likely also your tire will get a it warm at least, though these not as much as the fluid container. The tensioner knob itself is far enough away from the warm parts and covered with plastic so there shouldn’t be any issue loosening it after even a long bike session.

You of course want to either getting a trainer tire or use an old tire for use on the trainer, so as not to wear out a regular tire. Depending on how tight you make the roller there can be some appreciable wear and tear on the tread over time.

Some people have mentioned that it takes some time, 10-15 minutes, for the fluid to warm up and the peddling action to be smooth. If there’s one downside to this trainer perhaps this is it, as there was no real warm-up time on the magnet trainer.

While I have only noticed this when it’s been fairly cool in the room the trainer was stored in, it seems to only take a very few minutes to five minutes at the most to smooth out any unevenness in the fluid.

What you do notice right away when you get on it after it has warmed up is how smooth it is, I especially noticed it compared to the magnet trainer. It’s hard to explain because I never really noticed that the magnet trainer was in any way not smooth, except for the somewhat moderately loud sound of it.

Once up to operating temp the fluid is definitely very smooth, as well as the transition when switching gears to increase or decrease resistance. You will definitely feel a more realistic “Road Feel” when changing gears, with pedaling faster and the resistance you get when you do so. There is no adjustment hardware for tension on the trainer outside of the knob for the roller – you adjust tension via your bike’s gearing.

If you use a bike trainer you know that even the most quiet ones still generate a little noise; some of the noise obviously coming from the bike itself, notably the tires and chain/gearset.

And right away you can notice a bit more realistic resistance when increasing or decreasing gears. This is somewhat comparable to the increased resistance from air resistance and friction when riding outside.

Maybe it’s just my imagination but it just feels smoother than the magnetic trainer, as well as being more muted audio-wise.

So far I really like this trainer, and I can’t see any real downside or particular knit picks for the Ascent Fluid Bike Trainer outside of a few minutes of warm up time when it is real cool.

Don’t forget to check out my Youtube video below, which will give you a short demo of the sound level and what it looks like in motion.

]]>https://randombitsbytes.com/review-ascent-fluid-bike-trainer-travel-trac-comp-fluid-bicycle-trainer/feed/08267Website Review – DesignEvo Free Online Custom Logo Makerhttps://randombitsbytes.com/website-review-designevo-free-online-custom-logo-maker/
https://randombitsbytes.com/website-review-designevo-free-online-custom-logo-maker/#respondFri, 05 Jan 2018 18:41:56 +0000http://randombitsbytes.com/?p=8229esignEvo is a free online logo maker with 3000+ templates to choose from and customize – the templates can be edited heavily or just enough to insert your own text. It also has millions of icons, 100+ fonts, the ability to add shapes and work with them, and is an easy…

]]>DesignEvo is a free online logo maker with 3000+ templates to choose from and customize – the templates can be edited heavily or just enough to insert your own text. It also has millions of icons, 100+ fonts, the ability to add shapes and work with them, and is an easy and free (did I say free already?) way to quickly and professionally make your own logos.

Zella from PearlMountain Limited (a company that creates graphics and photo software for multiple devices – check ’em out) asked if I would like to review their free online logo maker, DesignEvo.

As I haven’t done too many computer-related reviews lately and the website looks amazingly interesting I decided to go ahead.

The Introductory Webpage

The first thing you notice on the DesignEvo Website is the wealth of information about the logo maker, the process, and examples. The page is organized well, and the scrollable design puts everything on one page for your initial perusal, some sub-pages for specific examples and items.

There’s some quick descriptions at the top, which you see right away, and mentions that the logo maker is free with many templates to choose from and below that is an excellent, well-done video covering a whole logo design from beginning to end. It’s worth watching this right off the bat to see the power of the creation process here, as well as how easy it is to use. And I think another factor here of mention pertaining to the video is that it illustrates the straight-forward process that would allow a person with competent computer- and online-skills to sit down at the logo creator and immediately be comfortable with working with it, and likely need little instruction or help. Though the option to do a tutorial cames up at one point when I first started.

Further down is a searchable database of premade designs that you can look at, and select from once you start your design, below that is a quick explanation of some reasons to choose DesignEvo, clickable examples of various things that you might use the logo for (these are clickable with a little help on how to carry out a design for that particular purpose), some more descriptions and example screenshots, and some testimonials.

I think you’ll see right away that the introductory landing page is indicative of the work put into the entire logo design site.

Creating a Logo From a Template

There are multiple places on the homepage that takes you directly into making a logo. Clicking on one takes you (after a short moment) into a search page with some popular templates. Over on the top right you can also click “Start From Scratch” if you don’t want to use one of the searchable premade templates as a base.

For the first part of this review I decided I would use a template as if I were creating a logo for a trails and hiking page, like my own website Northern NY Trails page (which right now actually doesn’t have a logo).

Clicking through categories over on the left brought me up some possible candidates, quite a wealth in fact with a couple of pages worth of potential matches. The logos obviously have had a lot of work put into them – they have descriptive clip art, are not overly complex, and look like a good base to work from or just use as-is. And there are a ton of them, with a lot of variety here.

Next I used the keyword search (over on the left right above the categories) for the keyword “hiking” and found a nice template to work with.

Below is a bit of the error and proofing provided – in this case my title and description can clearly be seen to be too long for a nice little logo.

And this is where the ease and power of this website comes in. I, having never used the site before, was able to quickly and without very much thought edit all aspect of the design – including tweaking the title and description.

This ease of use continued with the ability to manipulate the graphic in various ways, including color and opacity, and place it by simple clicks and mouse drags. You can also add more icons (millions here) as well as many shapes, banners, lines, symbols, and select fonts and font art, you name it… And everything is customizable and editable including the background and overall format. Though you can’t add external clip art or shapes, only from the library of objects included.

There’s even the ability to use layers – prioritizing and bringing forward or back various components, whatever they may be. And of course there is an undo and redo, which is integral when working with graphics – at least for me. Making slight or major changes and being able to step back and forth between two choices is great.

And you can switch templates mid-stream if you like. If you switch, at this time and at a few other points during the use of the site it will ask you if you want to overwrite the current design as needed so you are not overwriting something you have worked on as there is no way to save design mid-process.

The site’s underlying software is flawless – dragging and dropping, manipulation of graphics and text. There are no pauses or other slow-downs, everything is previewed in real-time. You will quickly forget that you are using a webpage versus a piece of graphics design software.

It’s amazingly fluid and seamless to use all aspect of the design process here, it should seem natural for anyone who uses graphics programs, computers in general, and the Internet. Really this is what websites should be like, especially utility and graphic websites – there shouldn’t be so much complexity that you can’t just sit down and start using it.

At any point in the process the Preview button (top right) brings up clever previews of the design as it would look on business cards, letterheads, a t-shirt, website, etc. If you’ve ever designed a logo before you’ll appreciate that what sometimes looks good on your monitor or even on your website doesn’t necessarily look spectacular on or in other media.

When done a click of the Download button brings you to a screen asking you to give DesignEvo credit for the design with a simple share on a social media site of your choosing and a bit of code to attribute them on your website.

That’s just fair it seems – for providing a free logo service like this.

Then it’s just a matter of downloading a zipped file, which includes your design in a few standard formats – of which can then could be resized, cropped, or further edited externally if needed.

You can also go back to your design, tweak it, edit it, and re-download it as needed.

Of course, once you leave the site the design is gone (except for the saved zip file of the graphic output of course).

Creating a Logo From Scratch

The process is similar – click the “Make a Free Logo” button but instead of searching and perusing for a template you click the “Start from Scratch” button in the top right of the screen and are taken to the project page identical to the one that you see when you pick a template but – obviously – the logo creation area is a totally blank canvas.

If you change your mind they’ve thought of this too; you can just click the templates button and select one.

For this I decided to create a logo as if for a biking group (like my JeffCoBiking Facebook club). It must be good enough for a website logo, business cards, and signs – unlike the trail’s page design that just needed to look good on a website banner.

I just chose ‘bike’ as a search, which gave me a multitude of choices. I selected a simple stylized icon to work with.

Again, you have the same options for any aspect of your logo here as are available for the templates – you just have to pick the elements to add yourself instead of working with the pre-selected ones (though when using a template you can replace them as desired also).

Because of the many choices you may have to restrain yourself from going crazy here if creating logos is new to you – remember when making a logo it should be straightforward and recognizable, and not overly complex; neither in the individual parts of it nor in the overall design.

Here is where some of the finer points of this online logo maker come into play – like being able to precisely move elements of your design using the mouse or pixel-by-pixel using the keyboard. There’s also a handy ability to zoom or zoom out the entire design (as well as change its actual overall size) and things like a dot grid for reference and alignment of elements in your logo.

A quick add of a badge for background for the bike clip art, some size changes and color tweaking (there’s even gradient color designs) , and some fancy text (many options and pre-made font styles to choose from or change) – and in a few minutes time I had a cool little logo that I could preview for various printing and display options, and save to my hard drive.

Conclusion

As expected for a new, free service like this there are a few downsides.

One being that you can not add your own icons, shapes, fonts, etc – and must work with what is included – which is a heck of a lot. You also can not save any design and go back and edit it (you can only save/export the finished product). And an option to create an account on the site really has no purpose at the moment.

But Zella from PearlMountain Limited, the company who created this, tells me that a save design project in the cloud and other advanced features will be available at a later stage. I also wonder if there are plans for a desktop or pay version with even more features and options.

All in all, DesignEvo is a pretty amazing little free service and website, with features that you would find it stand-alone software, or at the very least a pay online creator website. It’s easy for the beginner to learn if they have any computer skills at all, and has enough features to make even someone used to working with graphics appreciate the easy and quick workflow and options available for moderate logo design.

The output logos you create from it are excellent, professional, and look like custom jobs if you put a little work into what you create.

]]>https://randombitsbytes.com/website-review-designevo-free-online-custom-logo-maker/feed/08229PVC Single Bike Rack (and a Few Other Bike Rack Ideas)https://randombitsbytes.com/pvc-single-bike-rack-and-a-few-other-bike-rack-ideas/
https://randombitsbytes.com/pvc-single-bike-rack-and-a-few-other-bike-rack-ideas/#respondMon, 27 Nov 2017 20:15:55 +0000http://randombitsbytes.com/?p=7971If you’re not into kickstands, or have a carbon bike, or just want a convenient bike stand/bike rack for your bike while you are washing/cleaning/lubing/working on it there are a lot of choices. You can use anything from cheap bike stands (with mixed reviews), nicer raised-wheel stands with better reviews, real…

Or you can even make your own PVC bike rack, and you don’t even need to be much of a DIY handy-person as long as you can follow some simple plans. If you’re not interested in reading about my recycled wood bike rack skip further down.

Firstly though I will refer to a previous post where I explained a bit about making a multi-bike Recycled Wood Bike Stand/Rack (see photo below right), I don’t include exacting directions but more of a general overview of how I made mine.

I also made another single-bike recycled-wood kickstand as you can also see a bit below – original wood surface in the left pic, painted to the right. I used Krylon Fusion Plastic Paint – (as you can tell from the name) is more of a plastic paint but which works on other surfaces too. I used this paint because the wood was coated with a shiny plasticy (I assume to resist licking and chewing by the little ones) wood seal, this paint worked quite well on it.

This was originally the headboard of a baby bed – you might find it interesting that someone had chucked this out of their vehicle (or maybe lost it) and my wife found this headboard up the road from my home in near-perfect condition. The wood looked to be of good quality so I brought it home and disassembled it, and eventually built this bike rack. How’s that for recycling?

Probably here I should give you some measurements but unless you happen to have that particular baby bed headboard lying around it might not do you that much good.

It does show that you can use any spare wood you have lying around and with the help of just a few simple measurements of your own, and a little logic and do-it-yourself-ing you can produce a quick and stable bike rack, in this case a kind of unique design because of what I worked with – most notably the curved bottom stabilizer pieces.

Another recycled-wood bike stand that I made

Painted version of the recycled wood bike stand

Another one that I made which wasn’t quite as successful as the others is the one shown below – this is a good example of what not to do; make the upright pieces too short. I roughly followed some instructions I found online and while it seemed to work okay for the writer of the instructions it just didn’t for me.

Maybe this was due to using this for my mountain bike I suppose, as the bike is much heavier than a road bike and seems to need those upright supports. All is not lost though, all that I think that I will need to do is tack taller uprights onto the sides, splicing them onto the existing ones with braces.

For quite sometime I have wanted to try this guy’s design – http://www.gwfweb.com/bicycles/stands2.html. Mr. Foreman’s plans are precise, easy, customizable and the result looks professional and stable. Plus it takes only PVC pipes, some PVC glue, and maybe some sand and hot glue and screws.

The total price is about the same as the very cheap bike stands that you can buy, the ones with iffy reviews – do you want to put your expensive bike on something that has iffy reviews? Probably not.

Usually when I build something from a plan I end up modifying whatever it is as I build it, but I vowed this time to stick to the plan as much as possible.

Building this was fairly quick, though I would recommend you take a little time to read over the plans and lay things out ahead of time, fitting them to make sure you understand where and how things should be positioned and go together, including getting proper angles and such. If you don’t get all the pieces lined up it will make your rack jiggly while on level ground and less stable.

Top is detachable as suggested by plan author

As mentioned in the plan’s text the glue dries very fast. This is a biggy here if you’re never used PVC glue. So make sure that you re-position things and get an idea of how things need to align, making guide parks if needed, and when you glue and fit things together you IMMEDIATELY adjust anything that needs to be adjusted or you probably won’t be able to if you wait for more than a few minutes. You have a very small window to make adjustments, but you can do it, sometimes if the pieces are a very tight fit you may need to use a little muscle after even a very few moments of drying.

The only differences that I made in mine versus the original plans was I did not use screws (with the thought that if something came loose I could add them in the future) and I filled the entire bottom section with sand instead of just the four outriggers/legs. This required a little ‘detailed’ hot gluing to plug the vertical upright’s holes as I wanted to be able to take these uprights out (as mentioned as an option in the plan’s text) but I did not want any chance of the sand leaking out at any point.

Total price was just over $25 (as of Fall 2017) – it SEEMED a little pricey to someone cheapo like I, but again; if you look at bike stands and their prices, you’ll see that this is about on-point with the cheaper ones you can find, which likely aren’t going to be anywhere as stable or nice as this one. I got everything at Lowe’s but it should all be readily available at other hardware stores or even online, like on Amazon.

I believe that the plans could be modified to accommodate larger or smaller tires of course, height-wise as well as thickness-wise, for a heavy mountain bike you may want to consider making the legs wider or course, and maybe filling it with something like the nuggets that are used to make bullets or other pieces of lead or weights that might fit into the PVC pipe. For a heavier bike you might even want to consider heavier-duty PVC pipe like Schedule 80 PVC pipe instead of the 3/4″ thickness PVC pipe in the plans. There’s many variations that could be done on this plan.

It could also be modified for more than one bike, perhaps replace the two L’s on one side with downward-facing T’s and connect two units together. I think a dual version would still be pretty portable but adding more than two could mean more stress when carrying it, unless you make the outrigger connections detachable (making sure you seal in that sand or whatever you are using for the stabilizing weight on the bottom pieces).

PVC bike rack (unpainted)

PVC bike rack (unpainted)

Either the front tire or the back tire can be used on this bike rack. The back tire is slightly more stable usually, I think, but the front tire works just fine too.

I believe that this might be more of an issue on uneven ground, when you are physically working on the bike, or if you have modified it and are using a MTB in it or some other heavier cycle.

Rear tire in bike rack.

Despite previous experience with trying to paint (and keep paint on) pvc and other plastics I decided to paint this bike rack. The trick here is to get every bit of it at least slightly sanded, enough so that a good quality primer can have a good chance of staying on – yet not rough enough that the finish looks terrible.

For this I used a medium grit sandpaper; held in my hands so that I could get a feel for how I was covering every inch of the rack and every nook and cranny. I then cleaned the dust off with a damp rag, dried it, and started priming it with multiple layers. After a good drying period I continued with many layers of the finish paint.

One thing I forgot to do (or didn’t think I needed to do) was to tape off the bottoms of the uprights as well as the insides of the bottom horizontal pieces that these uprights slip into. If you made the whole thing permanently assembled/attached together you need not worry about this but if not a little taping off will help here. I had to sand off the paint around the bottom of the uprights a little and the insides of the bottoms that they slide into, but it’s probably no big deal as long as it is done and the pieces slide together properly and stay in place after painting (which mine did not until I sanded them down).

So… So far so good. It’s a great design, somewhat similar to some others you will find on DIY websites but a quick, easy straight-forward and stable design with good instructions. And it seems very customizable.